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.

  • slaacaa@lemmy.worldEnglish
    134·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      46·
      6 months ago

      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@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        6 months ago

        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@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          6 months ago

          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@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            6 months ago

            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@lemmy.zipEnglish
      38·
      6 months ago

      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.

      • Nefara@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        6 months ago

        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@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          13·
          6 months ago

          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@lemm.eeEnglish
        9·
        6 months ago

        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).

      • qaz@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        6 months ago

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

    • Test_Tickles@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      9·
      6 months ago

      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.

    • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
      4·
      6 months ago

      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

    • Goodie@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      6 months ago

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