Also, interesting comment I found on HackerNews (HN):
This post was definitely demoted by HN. It stayed in the first position for less than 5 minutes and, as it quickly gathered upvotes, it jumped straight into 24th and quickly fell off the first page as it got 200 or so more points in less than an hour.
I’m 80% confident HN tried to hide this link. It’s the fastest downhill I’ve noticed on here, and I’ve been lurking and commenting for longer than 10 years.
Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h
Yikes. That sounds bad.
I’m a SysOps engineer at a fairly large online casino.
Okay all my sympathy is gone. Online casinos deserve to die.
That said, my feelings towards economic vampires aside, the way the events unfolded is concerning to say the least. Cloudflare has been racking up evil-corp points quite rapidly in recent months.
Found the thread on HN. Here’s what (I’m guessing) a mod had to say:
It set off the flamewar detector, got flagged by users, and got downweighted by a mod.
The ‘customer support of last resort’ genre is common and not usually a good fit for HN [1]. If people feel this story is unusually relevant and interesting, I’m not sure I agree—long experience has taught us that one-sided articles like this nearly always leave out critical information—but I also don’t mind yielding in an occasional specific case, so I’ve rolled back the penalties on this thread.
The issue from our point of view is not about story X or company Y—it’s a systemic one: the most popular genres of submission (especially the rage-inducing ones) get massively over-represented by default, so countervailing mechanisms are needed [2] if we’re to have a space for the more intellectually curious stories that the site is meant for.
HN thread is here and it’s on the front page 7 hours old: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808
Many mentions made that a significant part of the issue seemed to be Cloudflare IP addresses getting banned in some countries. They wanted the customer to switch to a bring-your-own-IP plan.
Also, the discussion took place over 1 month, not 24 hours.
I think the HN thread is reasonably informative and nuanced. CF didn’t do great but it was somewhat a fog of war situation.
Realistically, this is why you pay for Akamai. You don’t get these shenanigans.
How the fuck were they still on a $250 dollar a month plan when they pumped through $2000 a month worth of traffic? That’s shady on the companiy’s part and Cloudflare shouldn’t have allowed it to happen in the first place.
Each party played their part here and did shitty things. Sounds like the tech equivalent of a crackhead arguing about selling stuff to the pawn shop employee.
The irony here, is this is the kind of vague and obtuse fuckery online casinos and sportsbooks pull with their customers all the time.
The irony here is that the article author confirms that they break TOS of CF and he still has a Pikachu face. Reddit discussion is pretty positive that CF is right in their decision and that new provider will shut them down at some time as well.
even if they were breaking tos (and i don’t think it sounds quite so cut and dry), shouldn’t the response be to notify them and allow them to fix it, or just terminate the account? demanding a ton of money to make the problem seems a skeevy way of handling it on cloudflare’s part.
They had two weeks to fix, instead they stood their ground and argued.
They very well knew that they were costing a lot more than the $250 they were paying and couldn’t get a deal anywhere else
