Cloudflare: Pay Me 120k Or We Shut You Down

[@TatharNuar]

If I heard "pay us 120k in 24 hours or your business shuts down" then I'd be on a call with legal first thing.

[@nightryze9591]

They don't have a contract, so legal can't do anything. That's kinda the whole point of the enterprise plan

[@williamdrum9899]

Sounds like extortion to me

[@AllanSavolainen]

@@nightryze9591 But they did have bought the paid plan, thus had a contract.

[@adondriel]

@@nightryze9591 they do have a contract, for 250$/month currently. They can't just void that purchase on a whim.

[@TheHighborn]

Yeah.

[@sheetthebed5685]

"Unlimited" traffic until they decide you've used too much.

[@fullstackcrackerjack]

Nobody likes a greedy pig.

[@jan.tichavsky]

Anything unlimited ends sooner or later.

[@hanswoast7]

You cold throw some terms about "reasonable usage" and such in the TOS and then later call it a TOS violation for actually relying on "unlimited". Shady shit all the way.

[@pavelperina7629]

I remember this from ADSL provider: we do not use FUP or limits. After one day of downloading of something like 5GB (which was a lot in 2002 or so - DirectConnect times), I had something like 2kB/s download speed and had to use 33kbit modem to download 15MB file I needed. Even like 10 years ago, I had problem with cableTV and asked if something like speed limits exist. Guy openly acknoledged they limit outgoing SMTP due to spam and in rare case they limit video streaming or (de)prioritize certain traffic, but I guess it's fine.

[@LiLBitsDK]

@@hanswoast7 should be illegal to use the term "unlimited" for something that isn't unlimited...

[@user-pt1kj5uw3b]

Its crazy how they made me feel bad for an online casino

[@johnbell1810]

i would be surprised the online casino isn't retaining the services of the law firm Gwedo and Sal

[@SyrFlora]

Nah dont feel bad.. hate CloudFlare😂, hate gambling😂

[@OverAndOverAndOver]

On God bruh 😂😂

[@NothingXemnas]

You, perhaps, but I have no empathy at all. Online gambling can suck my freaking balls. That is NOT to say Cloudflare is wrong either. Both sides are absolute shitstains and I take no sides beside some goddamn regulation over these asses.

[@cewla3348]

nah, aint no way you aren't hatebait

[@brianviktor8212]

That one guy in the comments: "Leave the multi-billion dollar company alone!!"

[@wlockuz4467]

There is no way it was not Rae.

[@souls.7033]

There's always that one guy 🥹😂

[@souls.7033]

​@@wlockuz4467 imagine it's cloudflair's ceo

[@renderedpixels4300]

casinos especially can get fucked

[@rh906]

@@souls.7033 Because the check cleared or they are on the powder.

[@Joolzt]

I can totally confirm this is their behaviour from my own personal experience. It's scary bad that they get away with it tbh.

[@stoneHeHenge]

That looks like a juicy lawsuit just waiting to happen. At least in the EU

[@arielcg_]

@@stoneHeHenge honestly curious, what kind of protection do we get in the EU for this? Or do you mean the EU itself suing for monopoly/DMA stuff?

[@sarabwt]

What? It was a shady gambling site.

[@sujimayne]

​@@stoneHeHengeEU will not do anything for you in this situation. That is a fact.

[@thelol1759]

@@sarabwt If they operate (legally) in the US it’s unlikely they’re very shady. Gambling might be the most regulated industry, even more so than banking. It’s a nightmare of auditing and compliance. It’s why even though I find it morally reprehensible, I have to respect the compliant sites’ efforts.

[@AllanSavolainen]

If they were doing something against TOS, then the solution shouldn't be, pay us more, instead it should be immediate ban (for everybody abusing the TOS) or listing which parts of TOS are violated and deadline to fix those issues.

[@TheFPSPower]

I think the comment of the guy talking about the BYOD IPs is the most accurate, cloudflare probably was having issues with their IPs being used for a gambling site, but they should have explained that and not put a sales team pushing the plan down their throats with no explanation.

[@akr4s1a]

​@@TheFPSPower tbf, maybe they did and the person left it out of their blog, maybe I'm a corpo bootlicking shill but it seems fishy that the guy didn't mention IP reputation damage at all

[@TheFPSPower]

@@akr4s1a I've seen enough reports of the same shady comunication from CF to lean on the side of the blogger. Still, CF's response was unacceptable in any terms, they could have just suspended the domains temporarily instead of purging everything.

[@stanley19430]

@@akr4s1a the real question is which casino?

[@AllanSavolainen]

@@TheFPSPower Yeah, instead of enterprise tier, they should just have simple fee for using BYOD IPs. Also not sure if they should be allowed to circumvent gamling regulations knowingly, so probably they should either not provide CDN for areas where gambing is regulated or just ban gambling sites from their service.

[@ivanmaglica264]

I believe it 100%. We have been in similar situation with our former domain/mail/web hosting provider. They got sold, then they changed pricing without announcements, after a while they blocked our account (again with no prior announcements) and demanded from us to cough up the money. DO NOT LET YOUR HOSTING PROVIDER BE YOUR DOMAIN REGISTRAR! Diversify!

[@alandunaway3000]

Or don't let your CDN be your domain registrar/hosting provider.

[@ChrisWijtmans]

I am not knowledgable about ICANN and DNS ownership. But how i would figure it is that DNS ownership is very serious business and it does not matter where you have it registered, they can not take it away from you. Especially if you payed for it for the whole year. That would be highly illegal. In fact i am pretty sure DNS ownership cant violate trademarks and copyright. You can request ownership over a DNS if it violates your trademark.

[@lashlarue7924]

This, this this. That domain registrar is sacred.

[@JulianLopez-nd9ts]

Any thoughts from people here on Namecheap for their domain services? Right now I'm in the middle of developing a web app for a hyper specific niche, but I'm still months away from an alpha release. I was considering just using one of my hosting providers (Azure/Netlify) for my domains but the more I look into it the more it seems like a terrible idea.

[@adenwellsmith6908]

At least have a plan in place, tested, where you can flick the switch and move off them

[@FadkinsDiet]

If I received that email I would assume it was a scam. Nebulous about what the actual problem is, call to urgency, do this now or else.

[@ameddayr]

yeah, i would quadruple-check whether or not it was real.

[@Esty210]

I'd have the problem that it looks very fake and therefore insignificant on first sight. I'd run into problems, start troubleshooting and not even remember that email. And then I'd find out, wonder what I did wrong and subsequently search for their violations of the TOS. Also experience taught me to make such things very publicly visible. Kafka-esque (but true) stories are always appreciated.

[@Oktokolo]

There is no excuse for this level of sales team extortion attempts and outright deleting stuff. If gambling is against the TOS, you don't try to extort more money but tell them that they have two weeks to find another provider.

[@asdfbeau]

It's also clearly bs that they couldn't budge on pricing. Everyone who's dealt with sales, in this industry, knows what 'no discounts' means: they didn't want their business, at all.

[@DataToTheZero]

@@asdfbeau I think cloudflare's sale team thought (and it's probably true) that the gambling website was making big bucks and decided not to budge on pricing because they likely got some sort of incentive tide to overcharging.

[@joe_ferreira]

​@@DataToTheZeroit is short term thinking though. Most companies will either move immediately or pay the one time hit and spend the next year migrating away.

[@blisphul8084]

​@@joe_ferreirathe sales rep doesn't get commission on long term, so why would they care.

[@joe_ferreira]

@@blisphul8084 oh I agree CF is killing themselves acting like this.

[@WillHuizenga]

If they lose 10 customers but successfully convert 1 to enterprise they are still coming out ahead. Hell, if they lose 20:1 they are still ahead at those prices.

[@wlockuz4467]

This is probably it. In fact, if they were holding those business plan customers at a loss then it could even be a net positive.

[@wlockuz4467]

This is probably it. In fact, if they were holding onto the business plan customers at a loss then it could actually be a net positive for them.

[@gonun69]

Not if they get sued by the ones they lost

[@lfcbpro]

@@gonun69 I'm guessing they are working on the basis that the customers can't afford to sue, with time or money.

[@yannick5099]

I would bet (haha) that such a behavior is illegal in many jurisdictions. Claiming violations of the TOS and making problems going away by paying more and then terminating a service they paid for when they refused… it’s so obvious whats going on.

[@DingleFlop]

They live in Silicon Valley, laws don't apply to them.

[@Alex-qq1gm]

Exactly. The surprise here is that OP doesn't even realise they are being blackmailed lol.

[@pluto8404]

imagine getting blackmailed by a bunch of granola eating mustache bois.

[@youtubeviewer5990]

good luck trying to sue cloudflare being a casino in these jurisdictions

[@krisavi]

It wasn't just paying more that would cause it to disappear. Even though from e-mails it might have seemed that way because CF sucks at communicating. BYOIP was probably main thing that would have fixed it, but is only available to Enterprise customers. But again, did CF communicate this? no they did not.

[@mcsquared920]

FTC should be getting in on this, the fake "unlimited" on the business plan is straight up false advertising. In general the cloud services market, specifically IaaS where it's purely commoditized compute/storage/networking, is full of anti-competitive behavior. Would love to see some trust busting soon

[@JohnSmith-pd8kd]

Vendor lock-in is the devil. Can't trust anyone, it's just too easy to "lock-in and extort" as a business plan. Always have a fallback plan to spring into action at a moment's notice.

[@hanswoast7]

Same for subscription models in cases where you could just buy the product in full. Surely subscription for streaming music makes sense, but not for an OS or a car.

[@grokitall]

as an aside, it is easy to spot which companies are good and which companies are bad. bad companies go for policies like adopt, extend, extinguish, and part of the extend includes making it slow and costly to migrate. good companies look to industry standards and best practice, and their unique selling point is around making using those things easy to attract customers, and making migrating away as close to trivial as possible to keep customers. if you have made it easy to leave you have a vested interest in making sure your service is so good nobody wants to.

[@innerthreatcircus5651]

Oracle sales techniques. I'd not be surprised if a new sales guy coming from that school.

[@MechanicaMenace]

Yup. All I could think when I heard this was "ah, you learned from Larry Ellison"

[@demmidemmi]

Pretty wild that business ethics are so bad in the US that people are seriously accept "be ready to shift your hole company in 24hrs" as a normal solution.

[@revelmonger]

People are always so quick to hate on the US lmao. Unintelligent people are always gonna be haters.

[@DingleFlop]

Freedom, eagles donuts, SHOTGUN!!!

[@BroodYouth]

who accepts this as normal?

[@revelmonger]

@@BroodYouth according to this moron "Americans".

[@MrSnivvel]

In all honesty, you should strive "be ready to shift you whole company in 24 hours" just as a matter of operating procedure because everything from shitty business practices, extreme outages, to basic cost cutting should have your infrastructure nimble enough to make it happen. (Will most people be perfect at it, no, but that's why I said "strive".) And yes, I completely understand that whether you're using something like Terraform/OpenTofu or Ansible that there will have to be a large effort rework on the configurations, but that will be much less than the effort of hand-rolling new instances/VMs/etc.

[@IntentStore]

This appears to be a breach of contract on cloudflare’s behalf. Also, with the business plan which includes SLA uptime insurance, it seems that cloudflare would actually owe this client a lot of money for the damages caused by their reckless actions, independent of the breach of contract which would include significant damages. So they’re going to have to show the client breaking their terms of service using the wrong plan for their business, the legal basis of which seems shaky, and could set precedent for business practices like this. Consumer protection type matters. Short notice + financial damages + inconsistent application of terms is usually a recipe for a smack down.

[@DeSpaceFairy]

Seems to be the growing trend of the moment for the whole tech industry, going from hardware manufacturer to the service provider they all have to dabble in some shady anti-consumer practices.

[@tagKnife]

I think cloudflare would use the suspension as a barrier for that. Since technically they are banned from cloudflare for TOS violation, thats what cloudflare would use for the reason to not uphold SLA

[@IntentStore]

@@tagKnife I’m glad cloudflare showed us this side of them, because I would not start a business with them knowing this is a contingency, and I think that sentiment is now shared by a large a section of the software industry. Not even having pricing transparency on the enterprise plan is a massive reason to be skeptical about relying on them.

[@IntentStore]

Clearly this was a prejudicial takedown of the business due to the nature of the business. There is no reason to take a 24 hour ransom course of action unless your goal is to make it impossible for the terms to be met. Saying this behavior is nonstandard would be an understatement. There may be a larger pressure campaign internally between cloudflare and another entity.

[@ChrisWijtmans]

@@IntentStore you are correct, they have a business plan contract and no other obligations. They have caused this business damages and are liable for that. Simply because they would not take a different contract, that is highly illegal. I am wondering how courts would react to "but they violated the ToS though".

[@arunvignesh7015]

Trust and Safety sounds like homelander saying Thoughts and prayers.

[@bibisaboow]

we tried to contact their sales dept back in October to get a quote. After seeing this, I'm actually happy they didn't reply :D

[@markcoren2842]

This sounds like what we used to call "Ex pricing". Cloudflare wants to break up with them but is willing let them hang around for an absurd price. They're likely looking at a net gain if the casino's $250 plan disappears and a sweet margin if you stay. If the client is actually a net loss now, then passing them to a competitor is a bonus in the long run. As long as there are legit alternatives, they're not going to get hit with monopoly investigations. It's a crap approach but they likely don't care as long as it's a net gain.

[@Marisueksu]

Insurance do the same to 'uninsurable' customers.

[@kiklion]

I don’t get how the immediate response to being on a call with sales isn’t ’I’m sorry, we have our technician experts on this call. If you want to discuss sales, that’s a different team.’

[@TWISM1337]

That's probably not how it works though. When working with vendors, the technicians actually working with vendors will be the ones evaluating what is needed, and their bosses will have the final say on whether to follow their recommendations. At least in most reasonable companies. I'm fairly sure that everybody needed to make that kind of decision would be in that room, due to the slimy way CF set up the calls (VPs etc. were mentioned). It's actually kind of fucking sinister when you start thinking about it.

[@Sofia-qr6rg]

@@TWISM1337 I mean not really - if a vendor came to me and said “we’re having an issue where you are calling our services too frequently, when can we connect for a call to mitigate this” I wouldn’t expect them to join the call and tell me to upgrade the plan. Id straight up tell them I’m not the right person for this and I can put them in touch with those people.

[@bcadventure2015]

I’ve learned working in health care administration that you just hang up when companies lie to you. If you were expecting trust and safety and it was sales, call over.

[@TheEvilAdministrator]

Yep! Been there, done that. I've also (politely and professionally, but cuttingly) chewed out more than one vendor for doing that sort of thing, or for e.g. not quoting me for the specific product number I asked for despite the fact that A) I know with 100% certainty they stock it, and sometimes also B) they can't possibly run out of stock because it's digital software (what I was thinking: I'm not stupid, thank you very much, GFY) and intentionally quoting me for something else that I neither want nor need. The gall of some of these companies is just awful.

[@size_t]

They're called "Clownflare" for a reason. Btw, if someones response is x times bigger than yours, you can throw their response away. It's now personal.

[@electrolyteorb]

Exactly... Reddit response only works on reddit

[@mgancarzjr]

Maybe. BS and fallacies require at last an order of magnitude more text to unravel.

[@monkemode8128]

@@mgancarzjr Maybe true, but even if you spend 10 hours systematically destroying every argument with facts and logic and even get it peer-reviewed, you may be 100% correct, but often, nothing changes. Because the real reason isn't the one they're telling you. Maybe it could help you in court though.

[@JohnSmith-qy1wm]

If I received an email like that I would initially assume it was a phishing attempt

[@TSD4027]

There NEEDS to be a law that when a company bans or kicks you for TOS violations they have to spell out how and when they were violated.

[@raymondlimkitsiang3847]

Yes, there must be a consumer claims court so consumers who are persecuted by big businesses who act in a dictatorial way can have justice.

[@ExSpoonman]

I absolutely agree. 100%.

[@the-answer-is-42]

This gives me a business idea: make a company where every department is actually the sales team. The customers will be sold the privilege to sold more things by the sales team under a different name. What could possibly go erong?

[@WeatherWX]

Thats Microsoft lol

[@Vysair]

Oracle?

[@manoflead643]

Does Oracle even have other departments? Their database software sure as hell doesn't make me think so. Long as they can convince execs to use their product, and keep the cost of swapping database providers high (by having tons of shit missing so implementations aren't reusable, and such), and have lots of gotchas for extorting people (did you know that ODB doesn't just stop you from using features your license doesn't cover, but instead records it so they can bill you for it later? :D), they make money. Good product optional. Hell, not even optional - actively detrimental.

[@beofonemind]

I'm actually going to avoid cloudfare because of this. "And for that reason ...... I'm out."

[@johnyepthomi892]

Nobody likes mafia behaviour. I hope they go broke. Lel

[@Forty8-Forty5-Fifty8]

Agree

[@Fafr]

I wanted to use Cloudflare when I get to building websites because, well, that's what everybody uses so it should be good? I absolutely did not expect such scummy behaviour from them

[@Heater-v1.0.0]

So who is worse, the online gambling bandits or the cloud provider bandits?

[@RandomPerson-tz7wk]

Casino obviously.

[@Zesuto3]

Cloud provider bandits, I know of ethical businesses who got screwed equally.

[@bruyh-ff6sg]

why not both?

[@sujimayne]

Even online gambling websites typically don't pull acts like this. It would destroy them.

[@arya_bakh]

both garbaj

[@Murv]

Wow okay, I'll be careful with Cloudflare in the future. They seem like shady business people.

[@daves.software]

If the downtime was retaliation because they were talking to Fastly I would hope that opens CF up to liability.

[@dealloc]

Liability for what? They are a private company and it's their services. They can decide when, how and why they cut your access. That is not to say that, if the reason they did this was _only_ because of this, then they were in the right; but they have liability against anyone that decides to use _their_ services, whether paid or not.

[@gunt-her]

@@dealloc breach of contract is not a right.

[@tagKnife]

@@dealloc Cloudflare is actually a public company. Their ticket is $NET And perhase as a contuiation of this the sales stuff, cloudflare missed their sales goal this quarter.

[@AnimeReference]

@@dealloc Not after they've taken money to provide that service.

[@ShrirajHegde]

​@@dealloc retaliation for going to competitors = anti-competitive

[@charstringetje]

There are only 10 hard problems in Web Development: Cache vendor invalidation and off by 1 errors.

[@mollthecoder]

Oh no, my off-by-one error just caused cache vendor invalidation!

[@Zmej420BlazeIt]

People need to avoid cloudflare if they can anyway, having so many websites use one company as effectively a middleman for network access is a huge threat to security of common internet users

[@RadikAlice]

I mean, didn't an outage years ago take down over 50% of websites for that exact reason? Consolidation man, it only makes _us_ weaker

[@ShadowOfTheSPQR]

CloudFlare is basically one of the internet's rapidly dwindling volume of digital landlords.

[@jly_dev]

"Unlimited" is never actually unlimited. It's a sales gimmick and a way to avoid transparency with policy/pricing/etc. "Unlimited" should be a red flag. If someone is being opaque/dishonest with you in your early interactions with them, they will probably cause you problems in the future.

[@komlogic]

and this is why IaC is a must; we have all of our config in a repo and even if a new service does not match one-to-one for config we still have all the critical bits

[@emir9348]

How does IaC help here? We use aws cdk for example. If we must migrate away best I could do is redeploy in another account. Can you expand this further?

[@brandonw92]

At least you'll be able to completely redeploy and not suffer unnecessary downtime. If you're concerned about vendor lock there is always terraform (but aws cdk is pretty great!)

[@kentchenery1813]

@@emir9348 because you still have all your config, rules etc. Sure it might not be in the same format as your new provider but at least you haven't lost them completely like the article implied when Cloudflare removed everything.

[@catsmao5313]

IaC could help if you find a a common solution eg kubernetes. all major cloud provider has kubernetes so having IaC that deploys straight to k8s will cutout most of the difference in deployment.

[@yanderenjoyer]

not enough, need IaC + on prem. this cloud bs needs to stop. remember the days when you actually own things you pay for instead of just renting?

[@hamburger--fries]

I moved our company site to AWS. We are a large book related site and got a similar email. We stalled for a few days and moved. They kept contacting us for a few weeks after.

[@tedchirvasiu]

Now it's AWS' turn to screw you

[@AllanSavolainen]

@@tedchirvasiu Yeah, which is why I've moved my customers to OVH and Hetzner and made sure their services can be easily moved between these two providers. Fixed pricing, no suprisis, EU laws and protections etc. Win-win-win.

[@gunt-her]

this is the proper solution. don't be honest with them, it won't help.

[@hamburger--fries]

@@tedchirvasiu Have not had an issue yet. Knock on wood.

[@blisphul8084]

​@@tedchirvasiuat least the way they screw you is written down and you won't be extorted for something that wasn't disclosed.

[@anatolydyatlov963]

Imagine seeing a job offer titled "Cloudflare: Trust and Safety Specialist Level II"

[@SandraWantsCoke]

Job description: Key Responsibilities: - Offer unsolicited "security" to local businesses, ensuring they understand the dire consequences of non-participation. - Develop innovative methods to persuade individuals to part with their money, valuables, or secrets. Must be adept at inventing new "protection plans" and "insurance policies." - Gently remind clients of their outstanding debts using persuasive tactics, which may include menacing phone calls, veiled threats, or occasional kneecap adjustments. - Identify and "convince" new neighborhoods and businesses to join our ever-growing network of satisfied customers. - Settle disputes among clientele with fairness and a touch of intimidation. Must be able to mediate between conflicting parties, ensuring everyone leaves with a mutual understanding (and a healthy dose of fear). Lucrative Incentives: Unlimited earning potential through creative financial arrangements. Career Growth: Opportunities for advancement within the organization, potentially leading to a leadership role such as Boss or Don. Health Benefits: Complimentary first aid kits and access to an underground network of dubious medical professionals.

[@christopherboisvert6902]

AKA SALES.

[@AEGISAOE]

@@christopherboisvert6902 what lvl xi would be?

[@petergamache5368]

Position involves frequent travel to customer sites and dark back alleys. BYO crowbar or lead pipe.

[@beofonemind]

Looks like they bulls-eyed customers who have more money to pay and went after it. Shady AF though.

[@johnyepthomi892]

It’s mafia behaviour. They went for the fast grab.

[@nidavis]

growth hacked 'em to death

[@beofonemind]

@@nidavis lol good way of putting it

[@lightprogrammer]

Cloudflare fumbling the bag hard lately

[@TechCellfish]

Yes, been discussing enterprise with them again. It is getting worse and worse year by year. Pay more, get less.

[@Sammysapphira]

"Lately"

[@jongxina3595]

I hear nothing but bad things about this company

[@thedoctor5478]

Their Workers platform is amazing, and I can't find anything that comes close to it. Also this blog post and comments are terrifying.

[@sub-harmonik]

& google's right behind them

[@buchnejf]

What I heard was, "we had a situation that was too good be true and then we were shocked and unprepared when it came to an end." If you are running a heavily regulated business like a pornography site, gambling site, or some site that deals with sales of firearms, which could potentially be problematic for a hosting service like CloudFlare, be better prepared and be an early and often communicator with your hosting provider. The author's surprise suggest business naivety and this was poor business planning on the part of the Casino. The overall message should be that if you are running a business that may be problematic to your hosting provider, be better prepared-- don't wait for them to flag you. Let me also add CloudFlare handled this situation, especially the communication, poorly. I would not choose them as a hosting provider.

[@gordahnculous]

Yep, both sides handled the situation pretty poorly, and I’d agree that the casino should’ve been expecting some type of price hike - that deal they were on sounded almost too good for their size. That being said though, for CloudFlare to expect a price hike of tens of thousands of dollars within a week is outrageous

[@christ.4977]

I use Cloudflare as my DNS. I'm a little worried I'm to be billed for the Enterprise home plan. 😂

[@GabrielTobing]

Cloudflare being sussy

[@sergeyagronov9650]

the did the same to us, without warning they removed 12 casino's and demanded 5k euro per month + fees first they removed the sites and lied about it then they tried to convience us

[@DingleFlop]

CloudFlare Sales team operating from New Delhi... All in all, this is monumentally idiotic. I hate companies that act like this with a violently burning, searing, solar death ray of passion.

[@DingleFlop]

Fuck Cloudflare, my god...

[@dee-kryvenko]

This is totally logical - because of the nature of the customer (gambling), the customer is a high maintenance customer. It probably costs cloudflare more than it pays, which in turn means that its services are subsidized by other customers. The problem is not with the cloudflare, but with the all of us, it is with our silent acceptance that we allowed giants like cloudflare to grow so large, that if you get rejected by a few - you are essentially out of business. Just like in a totalitarian country where govt owns your *ss - in western world, corporations owns your *ass. And it is not immediately obvious to me if either one of them is better than the other.

[@MrKlarthums]

Classic single point of failure. Having one distributor or one supplier with a monopoly leaves your company vulnerable to this sort of extortion if you don't internally control them. It says a lot when the distributor's next service tier is 40x in price.

[@timothywcrane]

It was real simple. You run a casino and redirect repeatedly. You must BRING YOUR OWN IP , or you will have to use enterprise services compatible with using your own IP. We do not provide your offering on our IPs and Enterprise is needed to use your own. The sales team is definitely human and disconnected at the same time. Wait till the reverse is true.

[@_tringle]

I am infertile from eating scented candles. The

[@DavidM_603]

died mid-sentence, rip

[@ColinFox]

@@DavidM_603 And yet somehow managed to hit the "Comment" button to send their comment.

[@XDarkGreyX]

What an arc. Amazing.

[@luis10barbo]

A true poet.

[@TAINCER_]

@@ColinFox Hit the button on the way down

[@Kogarasumaru]

No sympathy for Casino's, guess the house didn't win this time, big sad. You know when you go to a garage or insurance company and they don't want your business, so they give you a quote way overpriced in hope that you'll go somewhere else? It feels like that's what this was.

[@martins2246]

it feels like they missed an email or three. If there really was no contact there is possibly some lawyer options. Definitely worth the first try at reading the contract that likely says "we own you"

[@happydays4176]

Sounds strange. Story mentions nothing about the legal team being involved, when such cases should clearly be on their table first since even the contract termination should have its clauses. On the other hand, if your business is heavily depending on their technology, paying 120k for a year and then investing in migration is a viable option.

[@haminator55]

They've already paid for the business plan and had it cut off basically without warning. If they're not going to follow their obligations for the business plan, giving them 120k for the enterprise plan seems like a massive risk when it seems like they might just take the money and run.

[@gsgregory2022]

So I think the thing that puts cloud flare into the wrong is the emails. The simple version of the story is cloudflare said you violated our tos so pay us more or else. They never said that the tos was different for enterprise. Nothing they said was ever clear or honest. What was the tos violation? What was the problem for their network?

[@hanswoast7]

You can only refute it, if it is a clear and precise allegation. Avoiding specificity indicates you know your allegations are weak or false.

[@porterhouse937]

This is like robbing a drug dealer, they saw that it's a casino, so they told them pay up or gtfo, this was obvious.

[@NickTaylorRickPowers]

Lol the casinos used to have guys who could fix stuff like this Actually it was precisely because of those guys casino's were very rarely tested

[@Marisueksu]

@@NickTaylorRickPowers Emphasis on "fix". Makin deals one couldn't refuse. ;)

[@kubastachu9860]

Well it's decades old corporate upselling technique. Some 15 years ago when I was already quitting the webdesign and programming scene, my hosting company tried to pull this off on me. I took my business as well as some 40 clients away from them. They weren't the first, they weren't the last. If all those emails had landed into some not tech-savvy decision maker, he might have just gone for the upgraded plan.

[@chigozie123]

Can't wait for them to opensource another one of their internal tools to placate the public outrage. Last time, it was Pingora, I wonder what it would be this time. I personally hope it's their billing tool this time. That would be juicy, and yes, I will forgive you cloudflare once again if you do this.

[@intron9]

Pingora? What's that? A pingas app?

[@edhahaz]

We're sorry... oh look! Some bew FOSS! .. ahahah, nerds.

[@WhiteGroyper]

gambling is unethical. Therefore I stand with Cloudflare in this case

[@takeiteasyeh]

abusereply alias to sales

[@hanswoast7]

Replying means you accept the notion, that you did some form of abuse already. Great start of a conversation. Guilty by design, court not needed.

[@Edwin-nl3qu]

Its such a shame, their tech is really good and the people on the tech side seem super cool. I get the same vibe I got when Google announced gemini with a fake video and claims. So much hard work by good people ruined by probably like a handful of brain-dead/unethical sales/marketing/pr people.

[@theblackquill5921]

"I Just want more programming" I love this quote

[@platin2148]

Maybe someone should just sue them for shutting the service down.

[@gunt-her]

That doesn't solve your immediate problem of being shut down. You can only sue for compensation after the fact.

[@noprivacyverner]

There is no unlimited traffic he should be able to sue them just over that phrase alone

[@labasrytas]

Sounds like countries are banning Cloudflare's IPs because of nature of this business, CF wants to move them on dedicated IPs. Might be wrong.

[@skilz8098]

This is why you build your own servers and store, manage and host your own data.

[@zorankovacevic4602]

In Croatia, police has "Trust and Safety" written on their cars.

[@clockware]

Do they practice extortion?

[@festro1000]

@12:18 looks like Cloudflare CTO tried to get a hold of that other case you brought up, if that's true sounds like someone down the ladder at Cloudlfare has a side hustle going on involving extortion.

[@cardboardpig]

I think CF is hurting financially and driving sales hard - the unlimited traffic on the business plan for example is pretty crazy IMO - I would set some sort of limits to encourage people to think about scaling up to an enterprise plan when the time comes. IF they actually did purge the customer records without any cause that is insane, but I'm having trouble taking the story at face value. There is NO WAY a casino operator does not understand how regulation applied to their industry would affect shared IPs. I think this blog post is missing a lot of context for the purposes of making CF look worse. There is very likely a bunch of shitiness on both sides of this story.

[@TheBaldOne]

Oh for sure there's more to this than we know, from both parts. The casino was taking advantage of a cheaper business account to save some cash and cloudflare handled this the worst possible way. I say they're probably a match made in heaven.

[@nickklaver11]

webscrapers and customers hate cloudflare

[@finlanderxx]

I bet the sales team is ddossing their own customers to sell their advanced ddos protection.

[@local9]

Unlimited Traffic is an industry sales word, it's never upheld it's always a lie. You push too much through any entity, your unlimited traffic is very quickly limited. This has been the way for decades.

[@asjsjsienxjsks673]

We only have one part of the story. I wouldn’t necessarily trust the words of shady online gambling operator without hearing other side too

[@rlidwka]

Words of presumably shady gambling operator vs words of well-known shady hosting company. Would be nice to see their clarification, but in the absence of that I usually place trust in companies inversely proportional to their size.

[@KD-_-]

There are no "presumably" shady gambling sites ​@@rlidwka

[@TheBaldOne]

​@@rlidwkaI agree with you, but in this case the other part is an online casino that bypasses legal bans on gambling. So I don't believe any of them.

[@DocOrtmeyer]

this is when you sue CF for 250k or more losses in revenue.

[@georgezimmer5622]

That's what you get for mistaking a spyware company for a hosting company.

[@CodeFun691]

Just stop saying stupid stuff. You don't even know what spyware is.

[@DecadantHandshake]

@@CodeFun691 Just stop staying stupid stuff. You don't even know what this guy has been through, where he is, where he came from, what he had to do to get from where he was to where he is right now.

[@youreyesarebleeding1368]

@@CodeFun691 Perhaps you shouldn't throw stones from a glass house. It's clear that you haven't educated yourself on the different perspectives that are out there and why someone might call Cloudflare spyware. Cloudflare is a proprietary service, it's software stack is not free and open source so you can't inspect the code to ensure that it is respecting your freedom and privacy. Not only that, but you're using a service that is running on servers you don't own, meaning that even if they did have a free and open source software stack that anyone could inspect, it's not guaranteed that is running on their servers and even if it was, no guarantee that there isn't some external process happening that breaches users' privacy and freedom independently. Let's think about Cloudflare's business model as well, they have a ridiculous amount of data that passes through their servers every day, which absolutely raises questions about the potential for data harvesting and surveillance. In a situation like this, you can never be absolutely sure that Cloudflare is not surveilling the data that passes through its servers, whether its for their own purposes or in cooperation with a government agency (likely both).

[@thatsalot3577]

@@DecadantHandshake bro knows all, he works at the spyware company

[@TAINCER_]

@@DecadantHandshake People always say where people have been but not where they are going to be.

[@chuckincharlie]

When you get this email from your provider they are telling you they aren't interested in your business. If you are running an online "Casino" you should realize most providers don't want your business. You attract problems. Nobody wants you unless you are willing to pay ridiculous money.

[@mater5930]

Sounds like they had a runin with their Deception & Assault team.

[@beuio]

I would love to see this done to an Australian company. this tactic goes against a crazy amount of consumer protection laws that protect even B2B sales and would be EASILY a company and government law suit waiting to happen. Yes, Australian consumer law protects individuals and businesses as the law only stipulates a "consumer" of a product or service. It won't help the initial losses but damn, those law suits can be an unfathomable amount of money, particularly involving gambling and gaming companies.

[@Planeta1951]

Extortion with cloud provider? No way, that doesn't happen ever. Right? I hope more people will realize that if you make your whole business around service from other company, your business can get often legally wiped overnight. 4mln users in online casino that is a synonym to "money printer" and they paid 250$ per month... let this sink in for a moment. "250$ a month" It is their own damn fault for not taking care of this as business grew. Who are we trying to fool here?

[@markprice4810]

"yeah we need to spin up new domains to ..err... track conversion... getting around school/workplace/ISP blocks is just a side affect honestly. " this storey is so BS.

[@matthewrease2376]

This is why I'm wary of trusting gatekeepers to my website. It's bad enough I'm subject to my ISP and Domain name holder, but those can't be helped. Still, I don't see proper benefit to adding even more gatekeepers.

[@Cohors1316]

I’m normally a CF shill, but holy fuck am I keeping my mouth shut from now on unless that make a very public apology and policy changes.

[@AlemMemić]

It would be great to create a picture where two homeless men speak to each other about reasons of their situation. First one is saying: "AWS, EC2...You?" and then the other one says "Cloudflare in Enterprise"

[@Ethanthecrazy]

I'm at 9:30, and I'm already calling it that Cloudflare is going to default on debt they cant refinance.

[@JosifovGjorgi]

with sales tactics like these you can have successful business - rent an FBI agent or lawyer specialize in racketeering as silent listener and we can take care for the rest of it

[@gnatinator]

Sales teams can be asinine to deal with. I don't think cloudflare realises how damaging this is for their reputation long term.

[@niejajestem7962]

As a (hopefully) future software engineer, this sort of stuff makes me scared more than the "AI is going to replace our jobs" thing. It's really wild to me that things like that happen, but I guess it's just how it is

[@nikkehtine]

there is nothing wrong with AI itself but rather there is a lot wrong with the companies behind it

[@jurassicthunder]

outsourcing is the problem

[@about10ninjas]

Cloudflare's from CA. What do you expect?

[@pencilcheck]

wonder what's on cloudflare side, they should have someone write about this incident so we get a fair account of what actually happened.

[@AB-cg9np]

Fair would have been if they responded already. No answer is an answer.

[@michaelnjensen]

A purge action sounds more like a Cache Purge, it's not like they would have been able to see the audit log on CF, if they were actually locked out, something really smells with that article, I'm sure the sales dept was pushy (and too much), but the technical aspects just don't add up (We are on an enterprise plan as well from day one though).

[@thatsalot3577]

I get that big corporations are evil, but it sounds a bit unbelievable, I mean unless you owe them money, they shouldn't have any reason to ask 120k upfront or they''ll shut down all domains.

[@complexacious]

The upfront part is VERY common these days. I'm currently talking to various companies for all sorts of services and they all quote the $X/mo. pricing but then drop the bomb that this price is based on a $X*36 monthly contract payable 12months in advance. Regular monthly price is $LOTS_MORE/mo. So I can easily believe this part at least went down exactly as said. Something triggered sales to pitch an Enterprise subscription and sales gave their standard pitch. Whatever it is that means Cloudflare are no longer willing to keep them on the Business plan we don't know and if the author is honest, they don't either.

[@Forty8-Forty5-Fifty8]

My VPS made me sign a 2 year lock-in contract, but on a monthly payment plan rather than an entire year upfront. Luckily, I used PayPal so I can block future transactions, so if they want to screw me, they’ll have to sue me. (I am not worth the money to sue) worst case scenario I become an unhinged stalker and torch their servers while leaving ominous letters in the CEO’s mailbox and put on joker makeup every morning 😂

[@SianaGearz]

​@@Forty8-Forty5-Fifty8 torch their servers? I wonder if that's what happened to an OVH data centre a while back.

[@Forty8-Forty5-Fifty8]

@@SianaGearz DUN DUN DUNNNNNN. Never heard of them till now. If I skimmed the article correctly, sounds like thermal cameras indicate that the culprit was a UPS that was repaired earlier in the same day. The authorities then later apprehended the UPS delivery man through sheer incompetence. (Okay, I made that last one up)

[@SianaGearz]

@@Forty8-Forty5-Fifty8 OVH is very nearly gargantuan. But most people are unable to perceive this company because it speaks French, which consists of frequencies incompatible with human hearing.

[@neilm1454]

Drop that TTL before moving domains folks, if you are likely to have to move your domain in a rush you need a low TTL !

[@cajonesalt0191]

I like how no one seems to like online casinos and knows them to be filth, but also so many people seem angry that the government regulates it. So you hate it, but you hate it more that someone does something about it? What?

[@ЕгорКолов-ч5с]

What does it have to do with CF scamming it's customers?

[@cajonesalt0191]

@@nisonatic It was not. It was, in fact, views expressed in this very video by members of chat.

[@cajonesalt0191]

@@ЕгорКолов-ч5с It came up in the video.

[@shandromand1675]

Priority support just means that you MIGHT get a response back from support within 72 hours rather than the usual week+ long wait times. MAYBE. CloudFlare has turned into a bottom-line operation that is purely meant to enrich the shareholders.

[@Space8K]

they did the same thing to my friend who owns a big real estate business. CF is just lame

[@moohric]

Cloudflare’s DDOS mitigation is only somewhat viable for Layer 4. It is beyond utterly useless for layer 7 to the point that we actually pass traffic to our internal CDN and WAF for layer 7 mitigation before reaching our origins (our peering is only ~100Gbps so we can’t really handle lots of Layer 4). Do not use cloudflare for just mitigating ddos. It has never worked.

[@TechCellfish]

One of the comments on the article explains this well. Any shared online service would have been forced to take action when a customer tries to circumvent government blocks and impacts other customers on the shared platform.

[@privateanon7623]

Assuming that's the case, it's not done by demanding a 120k bribe to play ball.

[@Afro__Joe]

And that should have been brought up initially, not just directed to their sales team with no clear indication or record of what they're doing that violates TOS.

[@thatsalot3577]

@@privateanon7623 it's funny how we don't see the 24 hour window in any email or 120k upfront, just 10k per month for their custom IPs and everything in the enterprise plan, I'm not sure but I have a feeling that the author is trying to hide something because this is extortion, people put real money in gambling sites and it keeps rotating 24x7, they have every reason to file a lawsuit, but just writing a blog about it, sounds off.

[@doresearchstopwhining]

Agreed - that comment said it all. Shady tactics in response to reasonable complaints

[@geniustrash]

Ah yes, the classic "you are being illegal and/or violating our TOS. BUT for 120.000$, we can talk about it. Don't mind the free tier peasants that are affected, there are 120.000$ talking here."

[@HippieInHeart]

That's *exactly* why I'm so strongly advocating against outsourcing anything software or network related. Imagine your entire network infrastructure is saved somewhere "in the cloud" and whoever owns it decides to jack up their prices by like 300 % overnight. What are you gonna do? Obviously you'll pay up, cause they're literally holding your entire infrastructure hostage. Like, even if you want to migrate, that would take a long time, so you'd have to at least pay the increased price until you are ready to migrate. Like, don't get me wrong, doing things inhouse can definitely be a huge or sometimes almost impossible task, you'll need a lot of money and time, and probably also quite a few new employees to get the neccessary knowhow and education inside your company. And even then there's a decent risk that things might get delayed or just not really work out that well, or some other things happen. But at least it prevents anyone else from holding your company hostage and being able to demand pretty much whatever they want in order to allow your business continued operation. Of course if a company does everything by themselves, they'll then also have full responsibility for anything going wrong, but they'll have absolute control over what's happening with their systems too and no other company/corporation would be able to hold them for ransom/extortion. The ones that aren't shit are just not shit *yet* but I fully trust them to get there eventually. You *can* of course use external hosts as intermediaries, like, you start something, you need tons of infrastructure immediately, you go to some external host to set it all up, but the moment you sign the contract with them you should immediately start the process of bringing everything to inhouse solutions. That way you'll be able to use others' services for the duration when you don't really have any other option while you'll also be able to spend a bit more time on your own stuff and be a little more calm about the whole thing. Missed some deadline? That's cool, just stay external for a year longer and maybe by then everything will be ready to cancel the contract with them. But yeah, overall, seems like the only thing that distinguishes cloudflare from actual scammers is that they're not trying to install anydesk on their victims' pcs. XD And then the stupid "possible TOS violation" so it's against TOS to consider switching to one of their competitors? Damn, that's some YT-tier bs, just using alleged "TOS violations" to delete peoples accounts for no good reason.

[@agedvagabond]

They were obviously illegally allowing people from countries where online gambling is restricted to access their site via mirrors and cloudflare caught on an tried to extort them or make their own risk worth it. Pretty sleezy to be acting innocent when its obvious as hell they are knowingly breaking the law at the expense of addicts. Sucked in. Interesting that cloudflare was basically willing to help them do it for a price also.

[@MTWidowan]

congratulations, after reading hundreds of comments under this video it seems like you are the only person who realized that the entire point was BYOIP (Bring your own IP) from enterprise plan because cloudflare doesn't like their subnets blocked in many countries

[@MegaRazorback]

Cloudflare would hit just as hard if not harder by the judicial system if the 120k "contract" was taken up as they'd have the judicial system on them plus the FTC, IRS and possibly the FBI on their ass...FTC for violating US trade laws, IRS for coming onto a massive influx of cash seemingly out of nowhere and FBI because of the nature of the entity they tried to "get" that 120k from, they'd see them as part of a illegal ring.

[@Tony-dp1rl]

Never configure your DNS entry to Permanent. Always be Temporary with reasonable TTL. Been bitten too many times.

[@davidhollenbeck1674]

if frequently swapping your domains is a critical piece of your business, it's going to attract negative attention no matter where you park the domains. that's a huge red flag for a cloud provider. if I'm cloudflare, any customer rotating domains with a certain frequency is suspect. that specific activity is linked to SO MUCH BAD SHIT on the internet. if I catch you doing that on my platform, I'm going to be very heavy handed with how I handle things, because 99% of the time you're going to be doing something illegal. my guess is cloudflare offers that capability on enterprise plan because they can have a stronger contract with more legal protection. the type of contract that they don't require for everyday "consumer" level users. as a customer if breaking your provider's TOS is a core part of your business, you can't be **that** surprised if they randomly shut you down when you don't take the offer

[@Kas-tle]

I think it's that combined with the fact that on free, pro, and business plans, the content is always ultimately served by cloudflare IPs. Whereas on enterprise, you can assign your own IP to cloudflare. So currently if any jurisdiction decides to IP ban the site, they are effectively banning one of cloudflare's IPs they use to serve many other customers. On an enterprise plan with the company's IP, that would not be the case.

[@davidhollenbeck1674]

100%. given their industry they never should have even used cloudflare without BYOIP/enterprise from the jump.@@Kas-tle

[@adr2t]

@@Kas-tle Correct, but the problem is that they didnt explain that nor bring up the problem at hand it sounds like. Granted, we are going off one side of the story, but if they failed to explain the issue, that would be on CF - not the end customer.

[@Kas-tle]

@@adr2t we also have no idea what was said in the calls. Seems odd to me that they would first highlight bring your own IP in the follow-up email after the call if that was not the main topic of discussion.

[@adr2t]

@@Kas-tle We deal with CF all the time, while some people can be very knowledge, we still run into ones that are not. So its really not that surprising, esp after the firing they just did not that long ago. You also know this because of the lady who also was just fired a few months back. Easily could have left and right hand trying to explain what needs to happen with sells failing to express what has to happen. With that said, even if that is true, they should've gave them more than a day to get back with them to start plans to move vs just cut them dry off. Again, we dont know the full story, but for sure, even if Company A isnt going into full detail, something seems off from the images that were attached and express to the end user.

[@shApYT]

As bad as this was from a business/communication perspective. It was a temporary net benefit for humanity.

[@parulkumar8606]

I have worked in cloud support and there have been countless times, businesses don't read terms of service and think that they can use the infra however they like. All multi- tenants services will have terms and conditions to protect their business, but those rules also upset many customers. Many of the times these rules are there to protect other tenants. It is duty of the cloud support to handle these issues well and communicate clearly. Support should provide empathy and clarity, not use rude words like ASAP etc with hard tones. Stil, Cloudflare handled it poorly. This is a very big downside of running your business on any platform. Even youtube can block channels for violating ToS.

[@MadaraUchihaSecondRikudo]

If you hide important information on page 26 of your EULA, you cannot seriously blame your customers for missing it. Why aren't these limitations stated upfront on the sales page, ah, because that hurts conversion rates :(

[@gunt-her]

Yes, but the ToS problems magically go away when you pay more??!

[@SianaGearz]

​@@gunt-her different service tier, different TOS. If you arent sharing IP addresses and other resources with other customers, then your freedoms are much larger.

[@karolstopinski8350]

Well, but in this case the email should read "your use of our services violates ToS in such and such way. Correct this or move to Enterprise plan that doesnt have such restrictions"

[@gunt-her]

@@SianaGearz Then the email should say that, rather than a pathetic upsale attempt.

[@christianbabin8165]

I only just now noticed about halfway through the video that you had so many tabs open on your browser.... That poor computer

[@Luna0wl]

Didnt like Cloudflare before this Vid dont like it after

[@pieterrossouw8596]

Who's a reasonable alternative to Cloudflare though? I've only used CF and AWS stuff before and both starting to seem like evil corps.

[@Dom-zy1qy]

I hope they don't extort my 2 MAU business.