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Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay $120000 within 24h

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.

catalog3115 ,

I really love cloudflare especially for my hobby projects but in this case they asked for outright Ransome. From this I learnt to keep Nameservers & domain sellers different. I am going to transfer domain away from nameserver.

drdabbles ,
@drdabbles@lemmy.world avatar

Not just "this case", there's been countless cases like this with CF.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Could you provide a couple?

drdabbles ,
@drdabbles@lemmy.world avatar

You can google for cloudflare issues ranging from providing hosting for actual nazi sites to extorting customers by threatening the exact scenario se saw in this blog post. Feel free to google "cloudflare account suspended" to see many posts about people having not just DDoS mitigation disabled, but everything related to an account deleted and disabled. Many of those people had the audacity to, get this, rely on DDoS protection! The nerve, right?

sugar_in_your_tea ,

So no sources then?

If I have to dig, I'm most likely only getting one side of the story. This article pointed out that the customer broke the TOS and knew they were getting way better of a deal than they should've. I'm not so confident a random post online from angry customers is going to be so forthright.

That's why I'm asking. If you've seen some particularly interesting stories, it would certainly be easier for you to find them them me. I'm not looking for butthurt customers who got caught breaking the rules, I'm looking for legitimate cases of CF bullying rules-following customers into paying more.

drdabbles ,
@drdabbles@lemmy.world avatar

I told you how to find them so you wouldn't have to bitch about my cherry picking. I can't help if you'd rather bury your head in the sand, and it makes no difference to me what you believe.

fartington , (edited )

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    ricdeh ,
    @ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

    Can you read?

    gdog05 ,

    I didn't see anyone saying that but the correct response is: in the next billing cycle we're going to start charging X amount per month for X amount of traffic or we have to bump you to to the next tier.

    If things are so dire that the traffic is causing problems the correct response is to throttle certain domain traffic until it gets figured out in some way.

    Pay X amount in 24 hours or we remove you entirely is extortion.

    HowManyNimons ,

    The guy's running an online casino. With millions of subscribers. CloudFlare can kick them off the internet and steal the copper off the eyelets of their boots for all I care.

    BobGnarley ,

    Yes because you yourself are against something you should take the ability of adults choosing to do that away! And also make a company able to extort you for it!!

    henfredemars , (edited )

    Ah yes, the nuclear solution. Very reasonable.

    With that said, we only have one side of the story.

    chiisana ,
    @chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net avatar

    Lemmy hates cloudflare because they are scared of alleged “privacy” concern. So much so that they’d rather side with online casinos doing literal scammy business just to validate their claims that “cloudflare is bad”. They also severely lack the business acumen to understand what’s happening. It’s shit like this that pushes me further and further away from Lemmy and more and more back towards Reddit :(

    0x0 ,

    Bye :)

    "You have 24h to pay up" seems a lot like ransom, therefore "cloudflare is bad".

    chiisana ,
    @chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net avatar

    They were contacted in April. Any company can fire their clients they don’t like without having to go through a month of song and dance.

    redcalcium ,

    Lemmy is getting bigger now, and you can see the quality of discussions in large Lemmy communities take a hit lately. If you want quality discussion, go to smaller communities.

    x4740N ,
    @x4740N@lemmy.world avatar

    I wonder how this is going to go

    gregorum ,
    @gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

    Badly for everyone

    x4740N ,
    @x4740N@lemmy.world avatar

    Yeah probably, I always get curious when a controversy involving a company starts up because I want to see what happens next

    Tramort ,

    Jesus. Something shady is happening with cloudflare.

    That does not inspire confidence.

    slaacaa , (edited )

    The biggest red flag is the up-front payment for a year, gives the indication that they are in actual financial trouble, meaning short in cash right now.

    Fucking idiots could have been just increasing the price yearly without any resistance, it’s unlikely a big casino would care about an extra 50-100 per month.

    Tramort ,

    Exactly my thoughts

    foggy ,

    I'm pretty heavily invested in cloudflare. This news is definitely making me reconsider that investment.

    What I can say, is their stock is looking very healthy. There are a lot of people buying a lot of stock for them and the prospect over the next 3 to 5 months looks very promising. The only way they wouldn't have cash on hand as if they're spending a ridiculous amount of cash on some project that I'm not aware of, and I feel like I would be aware of it.

    This is very peculiar. Definitely warrants further investigation.

    raspberriesareyummy ,

    The only way they wouldn’t have cash on hand as if they’re spending a ridiculous amount of cash on some project that I’m not aware of, and I feel like I would be aware of it.

    Maybe someone dipshit in marketing heavily invested in LLMs, since that's the current hype among dipshits?

    kbotc ,

    Cloudflare is publicly traded. They had $1.6 billion in cash or equivalents in December. Maybe they want to grease up the quarter to show better growth against the market, but that is a fuckload of cash.

    raspberriesareyummy ,

    or maybe it's just a lower level manager who wants to polish up their revenue numbers to ask for a raise / promotion :) capitalists are ugly little critters like that.

    Vlyn ,
    @Vlyn@lemmy.zip avatar

    As I said in another comment: The up-front payment is the only thing that makes sense for Cloudflare. You got a customer that's costing you money each month. They broke ToS. You offer them a deal still to keep the services running. And their CEO/CFO tells you they are looking at other providers like Fastly.

    If Cloudflare gave them a monthly contract then the casino would simply pay for a month and switch over their services to a competitor in that time. So Cloudflare loses all the money from the past (where the casino used far too much traffic) and will barely recoup 10k (minus the running cost, so more likely 7k at the high end) for a single month. It's just not worth it.

    So they offer: Stick with us for a full year at least or get fucked. Which is fair.

    qaz ,

    I don't think I particularly agree with this take, but it's an interesting perspective.

    Nefara ,

    This scenario would mean major negligence on their part, as they had been with Cloudflare for years. When it was clear their services were costing more than the business plan paid for, that's when they should have been contacted with clear numbers and a sheepish admission that "unlimited" doesn't actually mean unlimited. It certainly seems shady to me that they attempted to make it about a TOS violation, that there's no public information about enterprise level and pricing, and that the second they said they were talking to a competitor they had their data purged. It sounds like a failed attempt at extortion to me.

    brbposting ,

    Read to me as:

    Look, for a ToS-breaking [and/or] legally questionable site, we need a LOT to make it worth our while given we could be named as co-defendants someday - and obviously we’re not saying [cough] you’re a sketchy business we don’t want, because if we said that then we shouldn’t take bribes and should cancel you no matter what, so please read in between the lines.

    sudneo ,

    If you are cloudflare and you suspect they broke ToS you quote which ToS has been broken, you specify which country blocking the customer is trying or has tried to circumvent and you force the customer to either move away or enforce geo-blocking for those countries (or have a separate account for those with your own IPs). There is no reason to cancel the whole account if the blocking is country-specific and there is no way that 10k a month is anyway a sufficient benefit for cloudflare for their IPs to be blocked in a country (affecting potentially hundreds or thousand of customers).

    Test_Tickles , (edited )

    It's because CF could see that moving to another provider would not be too difficult for them. If they went month to month then they would be gone after one month. So CF decided to go with extortion instead. Either pay for $120k, or CF will set fire to your business.

    Goodie ,

    I think it's far more likely there's some sales goal and or performance indicator at play here.

    Trainguyrom ,

    The biggest red flag is the up-front payment for a year

    Another comment pointed out this was probably to prevent them from signing up for a month then using that month to bounce to another provider

    HowManyNimons ,

    CloudFlare don't need to subsidise an online casino with millions of subscribers, at everyone else's expense. Sure CF are a bunch of gigglefucks but this time I think they made a good decision.

    catloaf ,

    Now they're getting $0 and bad press, so no I don't think they did.

    HowManyNimons ,

    $0 is better than having a customer whose costs exceed their revenue; it looks like the bad press is being managed; and also fuck online casinos very much.

    FederatedSaint ,

    Just because you don't like online casinos, doesn't mean cloudflare didn't completely fuck this up. They could have negotiated reasonable terms to increase their revenue on this account instead of going the route of stonewalling and extortion.

    So not only did they lose this customer, but this bad press will ensure a lot of others never sign up with them, potentially costing them millions in foregone sales.

    Yeah this was a massive boondoggle..

    tedu ,

    Are these millions of potential customers in the room with us?

    FederatedSaint ,

    If they're charging $120,000 per client, it only takes 17 potential lost customers to constitute "millions." It's realistic that at least 17 companies might be put-off with the way this was handled.

    IsThisAnAI ,

    On lemmy and substack. The damage will be minimal and forgotten.

    Tramort ,

    I read the post and it doesn't sound abusive at all

    Plus: cloudflare kept putting them in touch with the sales department. Not legal. Not technical support

    It's just shit customer service, even if the customer is making a ton of money compared to your fees. Should a casino pay more for other services, too, just because they" don't need a subsidy"?

    foggy ,

    As strange as this may sound... if you're having serious technical problems, it's the sales team you want to talk to.

    Sales people have way more pull at tech companies than the engineering teams do. If your sales rep sounds an alarm, people listen. When tech support sounds an alarm, nobody bats an eye.

    In this particular situation, they should be reaching out to cloudflare's legal team. But, with their own legal team.

    roguetrick ,

    Good luck with the lawsuit for breach of contract when you broke the contract. I'm sure the judge will be amused.

    xxd , (edited )

    Unless the casino is doing something illegal, it's really not their decision to make. If they don't want to subsidize them, all they'd have to do is be transparent and fair in their pricing.
    They way CF handled it instead just seems unprofessional and deceitful.

    Tramort ,

    Exactly right.

    If they are somehow losing money routing traffic then their pricing is fundamentally wrong, which is just as big of a black eye for cloudflare.

    TheEntity ,

    Subsidise how? They were using their existing plan as intended and even willing ditch the grey-area parts. If CF cannot afford to offer their plans as they are, they should change the offered plans, not hunt for easy prey.

    HowManyNimons ,

    Clearly CF were losing money on this account, so their other customers were subsidising.

    Ah fuck it, I'm clearly at the bottom of a dog pile here, and I don't want to be friends with any of you, nor am I going to start thinking that an online casino deserves anything but contempt, so I'll be off.

    FederatedSaint ,

    No no, you're really not far off. Few, if any people here are advocating for CF to continue to provide the same services for the same price. It seems clear to most (including the author) that a price increase was justified. The problem we're all having is how they went about it, agnostic of the client.

    (I don't care who the client was and don't care one way or the other about online casinos.)

    raspberriesareyummy ,

    It's not the decision to ask more money, it's how they made it and in violation of their own terms of service, also extortion, so yes they are dipshits.

    Vlyn , (edited )
    @Vlyn@lemmy.zip avatar

    Is there? The casino is on a cheap $250 a month plan they don't belong on and they broke ToS with the domains. While also costing Cloudflare money each month (as the casino admits themselves, their traffic alone is worth up to $2000 a month).

    It's absolutely in the right of Cloudflare to drop a customer that's bothersome. Casinos usually are (regulations, going around country restrictions), them costing them money on top is a massive issue.

    120k a year is a big slap of course, but it's probably the amount Cloudflare would want to keep them on as a customer. If they leave, so be it.

    I've seen it several times before at companies I worked at. They cheaped out and went with a tiny service plan to coast by. Or even broke ToS because it would be cheaper. That usually got stopped by plans getting dropped (GitLab Bronze for example), cheap plans getting limited, or the sales team sending a 'friendly' message that we're abusing their plan and how we're going to fix it. If you don't play along at that point you're going to get the hammer dropped on you.

    It also wasn't 24h as the title says, the first communication happened in April. At that point they should have started to scramble, either upgrading to a bigger tier immediately or switching providers. And it's totally normal to go to the sales team when you break the ToS of your plan or you abuse a smaller plan. They're going to discuss terms, it's not a technical issue.

    Edit: And I should also say, the whole "paying for a whole year is extortion" is bullshit too. Their CFO or CEO told Cloudflare they are looking at switching providers (as they looked at Fastly). So of fucking course Cloudflare is going to demand a full year upfront. Otherwise the casino could pay for a single month and during that month they switch away to another provider. So Cloudflare would still be thousands in the red with that ex-customer after they used so much traffic the last few years.

    Cryophilia ,

    The first communications were intentionally misleading though. CF wasn't trying to solve a problem, they were trying to sell a service. If CF had just led with "upgrade or we nuke your site" then that's scummy, but fair. Leading these guys on about technical problems and "trust & safety" bullshit was not fair at all.

    Randelung ,

    And understandably you wouldn't switch plans if all you're talking to is sales without context.

    sugar_in_your_tea ,

    Is that the first communication though? I would really like to hear Cloudflare's side of the story.

    Vlyn ,
    @Vlyn@lemmy.zip avatar

    There were 3 issues at once, so "trust & safety" is definitely part of it.

    1. Too much traffic use, this is purely a billing issue and CF probably wouldn't even care (they haven't for years) despite losing money
    2. Violating ToS with the domains, a minor infraction probably, but enough to cancel the contract
    3. This is the big one: CF uses one pool of IPs for all customers, the IP of a gambling site (like a casino) will get banned by ISPs of various countries (Gambling being illegal, strictly regulated and so on). This is the trust & safety issue, CF is actively hurting by keeping this customer. The enterprise plan they want to push them to has ByoIP (Bring your own IP), which would probably have been one condition of keeping them on. CF could have communicated better (if we got the full story here..), but for $250 a month they'd much rather kick the customer off their service
    Cryophilia ,

    So maybe fucking say that?

    tiramichu ,

    That Cloudflare were justifiably unhappy with the situation and wanted to take action is fine.

    What's not fine is how they approached that problem.

    In my opinion, the right thing for Cloudflare to do would have been to have an open and honest conversation and set clear expectations and dates.

    Example:

    "We have recently conducted a review of your account and found your usage pattern far exceeds the expected levels for your plan. This usage is not sustainable for us, and to continue to provide you with service we must move you to plan x at a cost of y.

    If no agreement is reached by [date x] your service will be suspended on [date y]."

    Clear deadlines and clear expectations. Doesn't that sound a lot better than giving someone the run-around, and then childishly pulling the plug when a competitor's name is mentioned?

    gorgori ,

    That would have been a mature thing to do.

    realbadat ,

    Considering the perspective of the poster, the misleading title, etc - are you actually sure they didn't?

    QuaternionsRock ,

    Until Cloudflare responds to the post, it is IMO most beneficial to assume that the OP is being truthful and forthright. Doing so puts pressure on Cloudflare to either clarify or rectify the situation, whereas treating Cloudflare as though they are above suspicion accomplishes nothing.

    After all, OP is very much the little guy here.

    realbadat , (edited )

    Eh, I have a couple of issues with that. For one, I doubt CF would even respond to this. I could easily see them using this very writeup to sue, with all the admissions in it.

    The bigger part though, is calling an online casino, whose own IT team (the writer) admitted they were knowingly abusing the plan they were on, the "little guy".

    Are they small in comparison to Cloudflare? Absolutely, those schmucks have way too much control of the internet. Calling an online casino, whose own staff lied in the title, the little guy though... Doesn't sit right with me.

    No, I'm not going to side with them, or with CF. I'm going to make my assumptions off what I know (two terrible companies, one of which has a liar writing an article where they pretend to not have admittted to their own lies about the subject), and I'm going to assume this:

    • Terrible casino used a plan they know they shouldn't have been on.
    • Terrible casino would have known what their traffic looked like for a long time.
    • Awful CF noticed, and said "Hey guys, wrong plan, talk to sales."
    • Terrible casino threatened to just leave awfuo CF.
    • Awful CF demands a year up front to ensure their costs are covered for previous abuse of the TOS.
    • Awful CF figures "screw it, they are stringing us along, just cut them off so we don't spend more money. TOS violation makes it easy."
    • Idiot IT from terrible online casino writes an article (stupidly) in which they admit to TOS violations, and pretends not to know about their own traffic from a resource they are relying on.

    Seems pretty obvious to me. Barring further details, my assumptions are based on what I know, and I am perfectly happy sticking to that.

    You do you.

    Vlyn ,
    @Vlyn@lemmy.zip avatar

    From the additional info I read, it sounds more like the traffic wasn't the main issue.

    Gambling is forbidden in a lot of countries or heavily regulated. Cloudflare uses a common IP pool for all customers, so a casino customer would possibly get their IPs blacklisted (by various ISPs). The Enterprise tier of Cloudflare has "Bring your own IP (ByoIP)", which they probably wanted to force onto this problematic customer to protect their business.

    So it's actually a problem, not just them paying not enough (which is another reason to get rid of them as fast as possible).

    batucada , 
    0F,
    NOT_RICK ,
    @NOT_RICK@lemmy.world avatar

    Well that all reads like extortion.

    Speculater ,
    @Speculater@lemmy.world avatar

    "Pay us money or we will destroy your business." Pretty cut and dry extortion. The entire article was infuriating to read.

    someguy3 ,

    Also, interesting comment I found on HN:

    What is HN?

    catloaf ,

    Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/

    tengkuizdihar ,
    @tengkuizdihar@programming.dev avatar

    Hackernews

    drdabbles ,
    @drdabbles@lemmy.world avatar

    Pro tip: Don't waste your time over there.

    br3d ,

    It's incredibly selective about which topics it's good for. Want insight into advanced mathematics or new programming languages and people there have amazing insight. But they bring the same level of confidence to the discussion when talking about topics they've no idea about.

    CeeBee ,

    That just sounds like the Internet in a nutshell for various topics.

    mox ,

    they bring the same level of confidence to the discussion when talking about topics they’ve no idea about.

    Generally, I've found the discussion quality across these sites to be something like this:

    HN > Lemmy > Reddit > 4chan

    But yes, I have seen examples of incorrect confidence and bad-faith arguments on all of them. I don't think it can be escaped in a public forum of humans. :)

    wirehead ,

    It's the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.

    (I am referencing the Soviet Union implementation thereof, for clarity)

    It's never going to bite the hand that feeds it, where people will voting-ring or the owners will just force-edit it to prevent that from happening. Outside of that, sometimes it might say something useful. The problem is that today's problems are not because of a lack of advanced mathematics understanding or new programming languages.

    drdabbles ,
    @drdabbles@lemmy.world avatar

    It’s the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.

    At least someone else gets it.

    Alphane_Moon ,
    @Alphane_Moon@lemmy.ml avatar

    It’s the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.

    A very interesting description. I only occasionally read HN via links from other sources, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a lot of truth to your characterization.

    drdabbles ,
    @drdabbles@lemmy.world avatar

    I'd suggest they're just as wrong about programming languages and maths as any other topic.

    starman OP ,
    @starman@programming.dev avatar

    Sorry for confusion, I edited the post to make it clear

    pop ,

    Hackernews, unironically named to appeal tech circles, but run by venture capital fund y-combinator, mainly to promote companies they invest in.

    As such it's mostly used by techbros (MBA types) and tech companies to show-off, start drama, push their PR, damage control, and occasionally post news.

    It's like linkedin, in reddit format. It's all about your connections.

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