6 ms·

I 100% agree with you, though I am unsurprised that HN is downvoting you. HN seems to revere Cloudflare bigtime despite the fact that Cloudflare often uses HN a

I 100% agree with you, though I am unsurprised that HN is downvoting you. HN seems to revere Cloudflare bigtime despite the fact that Cloudflare often uses HN as their own corporate PR platform. I absolutely loathe Verizon and I'll be the first to line up for a good publish lashing of US ISPs, but even I feel like this blog post is unnecessarily unprofessional. What strikes me the most is that this whole "event" would have hardly even registered on anyone's radar (it affected less than 10% of their traffic during early hours of the morning. I saw one single news article about it, buried on The Verge, but other than that nothing), except for the fact that Cloudflare's CTO was on HN this morning fanning the flames of the one thread about it. It's like they dug their own hole drawing attention to the "Cloudflare outtage" headline, and now they're overcompensating by going to drastic measures to blame someone else. And now they keep harping on the fact that Verizon still hasn't responded? Sure, part of that is probably the fact that Verizon is a giant corporation that doesn't want to bother with this stuff, but the other part is that this "event" was hardly even big enough of a deal to register on VZ's PR team's radar, no matter how much CF whines about it. This blog post (and the accompanying HN comments from Cloudflare execs) just scream "immature company" to me. There's a reason that Cloudflare is the one making this blog post and devoting CEO time to it while the established behemoth is just going about their business as usual.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
The context (which isn't obvious, and I don't blame you for not knowing it) is that the Internet is held together by spit and duct tape. The only reason it works at all is that major participants are good actors, in the sense that: 1. They implement basic precautions to prevent dumb things from going wrong. 2. They're available 24/7, to immediately respond to and remediate whatever does go wrong. 3. Both of the above are core obligations, which supersede any questions of public relations or maturity or higher-ups not wanting to be bothered. If Verizon can't be trusted to properly operate their network, that's an immediate threat to the health of the Internet, and many people do need to be made aware of it. It's not just Cloudflare being salty because their customers yelled at them.
- txcwpalpha 7y ago
  I know the context, but that's irrelevant here. Whatever the cause, a root cause analysis pointing back to CF is nice for CF to help solve the situation, and is even nice to have for us tech enthusiasts here on HN (though it should still maintain professionalism). But for customers and decision makers at companies that might be looking at considering purchasing Cloudflare, you know what I don't care about? Who's fault it was. There are multiple buckets of companies here: 1. Cloud providers that were effected enough to apparently devote not insignificant CEO and CTO time to it (Cloudflare) 2. Cloud providers that were affected but seemingly not enough for it to even register as anything more than a blip on their status tracker (Google, AWS, etc) 3. Cloud providers that weren't effected As a potential customer thinking about buying services from one of these companies, which one do you think I am doing to do with? It certainly won't be CF. And if I am already engaged with CF, I want to know what CF is going to do to mitigate this situation in the future, and no, pointing fingers like a child and saying "it wasn't our fault!" doesn't count. Cloudflare can't really control Verizon's actions that lead to this situation, but they can control how they respond to it and mitigate it. They had an opportunity to stand up as a leader and improve the internet (which is literally their company motto). As you pointed out, the internet working correctly is a matter of companies working together as good actors, and getting these companies to work together via good, strong relationships is a part of that. Did Cloudflare do that? Nah. Instead, they made a petty blog post and their CEO is on Twitter telling Verizon they should be ashamed. I don't know exactly what his goal there was, but I assume it has something to do with hoping they'll be better in the future (if that's not his goal, then it really is just petty finger pointing). And if Cloudflare's CEO's method of getting people to improve their work is to publicly shame them, I really feel bad for anyone who works under him.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    To be frank, your post makes it clear that you don't know the context. CF simply cannot do anything on their own to mitigate the problem where Verizon constructs bad BGP routes to Cloudflare IPs and then advertises those routes to third parties. The only mitigation possible is to contact whoever's advertising the bad routes and get them to stop.
bmon 7y ago
> What strikes me the most is that this whole "event" would have hardly even registered on anyone's radar (it affected less than 10% of their traffic during early hours of the morning. It wasn't just CloudFlare who were affected. And the time of day is completely irrelevant, I live in Australia and was affected by this during evening peak time. Some very popular services (eg: discord) were completely knocked offline. I think you're underestimating the impact of this event.
dragonsky67 7y ago
Please remember that this was early in the morning if and only if you happen to live in US time zones. There are many parts of the world where the sun shines when it is dark in the US.
mkl 7y ago
I, in New Zealand, was well aware due to the number of inaccessible websites. It was a significant event not just on many people's radar, but actively preventing them from doing everyday things. That said, I do think the tone of this blog post may have been taken a bit far.
jgrahamc 7y ago
You should go back and read what I wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20262316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20262316 I didn't fan flames. There was already a link to our status page on the front page of HN. While the event was happening I gave short updates by editing a comment here. Also, your "affected less than 10% of their traffic during early hours of the morning" is incredibly parochial and seems to ignore the fact that people use the Internet world over.
- txcwpalpha 7y ago
  >While the event was happening I gave short updates by editing a comment here. It is disingenuous to only state you edited "a comment" there. You posted 10 comments in that thread, with at least another 10 edits. Of the top 5 comments, three of them are yours. On HN, each time you make a comment and people upvote your comment, it contributes to ranking the post higher on HN's front page. I fully understand that you were probably just trying to be communicative, but unintentionally or not, you did "fan the flames" by drawing additional attention to the issue.
  - jgrahamc 7y ago
    So, you'd propose I sit back and leave a story with incomplete information on HN's front page and say nothing? True that I posted other comments but they are short and don't say much. The real action was the main top comment.
    - txcwpalpha 7y ago
      Absolutely not! I appreciate your communication during the incident, and I definitely don't mean to discourage any participation in threads or reduce communication. I'm just pointing out that it did, if unintentionally, draw more attention to the issue. What I don't appreciate is your company's unprofessional response re: Verizon after the issue ended, but that's been discussed elsewhere.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago

The context (which isn't obvious, and I don't blame you for not knowing it) is that the Internet is held together by spit and duct tape. The only reason it works at all is that major participants are good actors, in the sense that: 1. They implement basic precautions to prevent dumb things from going wrong. 2. They're available 24/7, to immediately respond to and remediate whatever does go wrong. 3. Both of the above are core obligations, which supersede any questions of public relations or maturity or higher-ups not wanting to be bothered. If Verizon can't be trusted to properly operate their network, that's an immediate threat to the health of the Internet, and many people do need to be made aware of it. It's not just Cloudflare being salty because their customers yelled at them.

txcwpalpha 7y ago
I know the context, but that's irrelevant here. Whatever the cause, a root cause analysis pointing back to CF is nice for CF to help solve the situation, and is even nice to have for us tech enthusiasts here on HN (though it should still maintain professionalism). But for customers and decision makers at companies that might be looking at considering purchasing Cloudflare, you know what I don't care about? Who's fault it was. There are multiple buckets of companies here: 1. Cloud providers that were effected enough to apparently devote not insignificant CEO and CTO time to it (Cloudflare) 2. Cloud providers that were affected but seemingly not enough for it to even register as anything more than a blip on their status tracker (Google, AWS, etc) 3. Cloud providers that weren't effected As a potential customer thinking about buying services from one of these companies, which one do you think I am doing to do with? It certainly won't be CF. And if I am already engaged with CF, I want to know what CF is going to do to mitigate this situation in the future, and no, pointing fingers like a child and saying "it wasn't our fault!" doesn't count. Cloudflare can't really control Verizon's actions that lead to this situation, but they can control how they respond to it and mitigate it. They had an opportunity to stand up as a leader and improve the internet (which is literally their company motto). As you pointed out, the internet working correctly is a matter of companies working together as good actors, and getting these companies to work together via good, strong relationships is a part of that. Did Cloudflare do that? Nah. Instead, they made a petty blog post and their CEO is on Twitter telling Verizon they should be ashamed. I don't know exactly what his goal there was, but I assume it has something to do with hoping they'll be better in the future (if that's not his goal, then it really is just petty finger pointing). And if Cloudflare's CEO's method of getting people to improve their work is to publicly shame them, I really feel bad for anyone who works under him.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  To be frank, your post makes it clear that you don't know the context. CF simply cannot do anything on their own to mitigate the problem where Verizon constructs bad BGP routes to Cloudflare IPs and then advertises those routes to third parties. The only mitigation possible is to contact whoever's advertising the bad routes and get them to stop.

bmon 7y ago

> What strikes me the most is that this whole "event" would have hardly even registered on anyone's radar (it affected less than 10% of their traffic during early hours of the morning. It wasn't just CloudFlare who were affected. And the time of day is completely irrelevant, I live in Australia and was affected by this during evening peak time. Some very popular services (eg: discord) were completely knocked offline. I think you're underestimating the impact of this event.

dragonsky67 7y ago

Please remember that this was early in the morning if and only if you happen to live in US time zones. There are many parts of the world where the sun shines when it is dark in the US.

mkl 7y ago

I, in New Zealand, was well aware due to the number of inaccessible websites. It was a significant event not just on many people's radar, but actively preventing them from doing everyday things. That said, I do think the tone of this blog post may have been taken a bit far.

jgrahamc 7y ago

You should go back and read what I wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20262316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20262316 I didn't fan flames. There was already a link to our status page on the front page of HN. While the event was happening I gave short updates by editing a comment here. Also, your "affected less than 10% of their traffic during early hours of the morning" is incredibly parochial and seems to ignore the fact that people use the Internet world over.

txcwpalpha 7y ago
>While the event was happening I gave short updates by editing a comment here. It is disingenuous to only state you edited "a comment" there. You posted 10 comments in that thread, with at least another 10 edits. Of the top 5 comments, three of them are yours. On HN, each time you make a comment and people upvote your comment, it contributes to ranking the post higher on HN's front page. I fully understand that you were probably just trying to be communicative, but unintentionally or not, you did "fan the flames" by drawing additional attention to the issue.
- jgrahamc 7y ago
  So, you'd propose I sit back and leave a story with incomplete information on HN's front page and say nothing? True that I posted other comments but they are short and don't say much. The real action was the main top comment.
  - txcwpalpha 7y ago
    Absolutely not! I appreciate your communication during the incident, and I definitely don't mean to discourage any participation in threads or reduce communication. I'm just pointing out that it did, if unintentionally, draw more attention to the issue. What I don't appreciate is your company's unprofessional response re: Verizon after the issue ended, but that's been discussed elsewhere.