Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h
robindev.substack.com
TL;DR: We've been on the Cloudflare Business plan ($250/month) for years. They suddenly contacted us and asked us to either pay them $120k up front for one year of Enterprise within 24 hours or they would take down all of our domains. While this escalated up our business we had 3 sales calls with them, trying to figure out what was happening and how to reach a reasonable contract in a week. When we told them we were also in talks with Fastly, they suddenly "purged" all our domains, causing huge downtime in our core business, sleepless nights migrating away from CF, irreparable loss in customer trust and weeks of ongoing downtime in our internal systems.

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.

  • sudneoEnglish
    101·
    6 months ago

    I worked for an online casino in the past. What they do is a standard in the industry. The company I worked for was a small startup and onwed hundreds of domains, mostly just to protect the brand, 98% of which redirected to the main domain, with a few serving slightly different sites for different jurisdictions (e.g. Ontario regulations require that everything happens under a .ca domain). The “blocking evasion” doesn’t require CF to do anything, besides forcing the customer to block traffic from certain countries (the ones where you are suspected to evade the block). At this point - if the casino is really operating in the black or gray markets - they can just set ingress to their site outside CF for those countries only if they really wanted. I worked also for a company who was doing this to allow traffic from Russia, changing every day mirrors (and they had an IT department of maybe 20, it was a joke), and Russia was the main market for them.

    If what is told in the article is true - I.e. 95% of the traffic was through the main website - then it doesn’t look like they were really doing this sort of evading deliberately, considering that in that 5% you have all your alternative TLDs plus the traffic from gray/black markets. Having hundreds of domains and some small percentage of traffic from black markets is something that just happens, it’s different from continuously registering new domains for providing access where the previous ones got DNS blocked (this is domain block). It doesn’t seem this is what they were doing based on the article, and if they were, then CF emails didn’t mention it, which is insane.

    Obviously we don’t know the full story, so everything has to he taken with a grain of salt.