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OP, you have garnered a lot of sympathy by the HN community which I believe in part contributed to your problem being resolved. I think it would be fair to prov

by _vufv 4y ago

OP, you have garnered a lot of sympathy by the HN community which I believe in part contributed to your problem being resolved. I think it would be fair to provide more info about what the issue was in the end. It's not OK to be like "HN I had a bad experience with Company X" and then be like "k, thx @jgrahamc, bye" when your complaint gets resolved due to the attention it received. There are so many questions this leaves unanswered: - Was this a one-off error in Cloudflare's processes? (These things happen on a big enough scale.) - Were you violating a specific clause of Cloudflare's T&C? How clear was the clause? What did you do to fix this? - Was the issue that Cloudflare estimated that you're not paying enough given the bandwidth you're consuming? Did you end up signing up for the Enterprise plan? Transparency would benefit both Cloudflare (in not making people unnecessarily apprehensive about becoming/remaining a customer) and you (in demonstrating that you're handling this issue in a professional and responsible manner).

runnerup 4y ago
Would be nice if any parties which end up “using” HN to solve their customer service issues were somehow obligated to provide the community with a candid postmortem. That would be the right way to give back for customers using us as an amplifier and for corporations relying on us to be a shibboleth (a prefilter so providers know that this is a true issue unsolvable through existing support channels they have established for customers). Sharing these learnings with other potential founders would also be in line with the raison d’etre of HN. It would provide other founders with lessons they can takeaway and apply to their future startups to maybe do a few of these things right the first time around. For both sides, HN is “picking up slack” in the system and it would be right to support the community with candid postmortems.
dezb 4y ago
oh it is 100% entirely OK to share that you got screwed by a company .. this crap happens all the time.. companies like this get away with ZERO shits give about customer support all the time.. it is insane..
- lolinder 4y ago
  Not that this is true in this case, but a large number of HN support thread creators are very cagey about the nature of their business. I suspect a lot of the time they know they broke the ToS and are hoping that HN will get the pitchforks out to help them get their way regardless. Again, that doesn't seem to apply here, but I've stopped assuming that the existence of an HN support thread by itself shows malfeasance or incompetence on the part of the company.
  - nightpool 4y ago
    Why "doesn't it seem to apply" that a blockchain scraping/data aggregation firm would be cagey about the nature of their business? I can't think of shakier grounds for a business to rest on, in two different dimensions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639879). (Reliance on customers not being sophisticated enough to set up API integrations themselves, reliance on blockchain as a failing segment of the market). Obviously it's not necessarily against Cloudflare's TOS to be a precarious business, but generally when a business' foundation is sketchy than it's more likely that more of the interactions they have with others are going to be sketchy.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      Is Zapier untrustworthy? ITTT? Microsoft with Flow? It’s absurd to think that somehow, just because someone works on tools that help people do things without code, that they’re somehow untrustworthy because of targeting “customers not sophisticated enough”. That’s insulting to both the service and their customers.
- ndneighbor 4y ago
  Unfortunately the norm in our industry, can't have "Cloud" margins without sacrificing something.
tardis_thad 4y ago
I'd be happy to provide more info but I have none. First I communicated with support which told me that my account was restricted most likely due to 2.8 clause violation (non html content) and suggested to contact with sales which I immediately did. Sales over the phone (was fastest) told me that it's good I contacted as otherwise in 24hours my account would be fully banned(whatever it means) and that they will prepare me an offer in 15 minutes, but it was taking longer (no response after an hour or so) and in the meanwhile I wrote Twitter and HN post which CTO of Cloudflare noticed and then after a while I've got another phone call from sales that I should update my ticket to ask unbanning my account as it was approved now by CTO which I did and that solved the issue at least for now - and that's it - no further info what the issue was, still waiting on Enterprise plan quote for me.
- godzillabrennus 4y ago
  Hilarious you got sales to call you back. I had to ping their CTO after multiple attempts to have sales work with me failed. He finally got them to give me a demo of their zero trust solution. No one ever followed up with me again though. It’s like they don’t want to sell an enterprise (tens of thousands of dollars a year) subscription… The only sales guy who called me back before the CTO got involved was Kingsley Okoroh out of their UK office. I’m in the states. He even had no idea why no one in the states would call me. Anyway, Kingsley tried hard to help, Kingsley should be their head of sales since no one else cares.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I've had only limited interaction with their sales people, but find it interesting they weren't on-the-ball trying to sell an account that valuable, either—we were more toward the bottom end of their enterprise range, so I'd just assumed we were too small-potatoes for them, but those were by far the least-hungry sales people I've ever interacted with. It was like I was bothering them. LOL. Also some of them seemed to know very little about their offerings, market segments, et c., which was weird. [EDIT] Oh, tens of K $ per year, not month. Yeah, that'd have been us, too. Mid tens of K $ per year.
NicoJuicy 4y ago
Cloudflare is really transparant about things ( eg. outages). Reality is that Cloudflare serves 60% of the internet and this issue popped up. They are checking it internally what happened, as I understand from jgrahamc.
- nolok 4y ago
  I don't think you realize it, but your answer while being wrong on many levels isn't even saying what you think it is saying. Reading your message, what one understands is "Cloudflare has so much on their hand you would be stupid to give them your business and think they would have time to deal with it", aka run away.
  - NicoJuicy 4y ago
    That's not what it says. Having many employees means you need to improve processes sometimes. I actually don't know any businesses ( except solo ones) that don't have issues tbh. It's part of having employees. That cloudfare handles 60% of the internet, just makes the odds really high for someone to complain. It's resolved pretty quick and they are following up internally on what happened. And the OP mentioned himselve what the issue was fyi. Check his latest post. This whole thing is about someone bending the rules concerning CW and he knows it :)
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > This whole thing is about someone bending the rules concerning CW and he knows it :) Hell no. Using workers for non-html content is not "bending the rules". It's a normal and encouraged use case. And saying "I'm a heavy user, is that maybe part of it?" does not mean they did anything wrong. I don't see any signs of bending rules.
      - NicoJuicy 4y ago
        A very heavy user where they literally said "it could potentially work".
nullcaution 4y ago
> It's not OK to be like "HN I had a bad experience... That is rather aggressive?? Maybe thry live in another time zone and are asleep, or have other obligations like school pickup. Given them at least 24 hours to respond. sheesh...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- smcin 4y ago
  Ok, but it's reasonable to suspect other users might also have had their accounts banned if it had been a systematic outage or ML hiccup, and given there's a 24hr limit to that ban becoming permanent, it's reasonable to expect an update soon as possible, even if that update is just a one-line "our status is X but we still don't know why this happened to us".
  - nullcaution 4y ago
    What? no. On the flip side what if their company is convulsing at the possibility of being offline for a few days due to the issue, updating a HN post would be their lowest priority untill they find a solution. Give them a break, OP owes us nothing.
    - smcin 4y ago
      Noone said it was their highest priority. But given that HN has a daily stream of horror-stories/complaints from SaaS/cloud/payment users, it would be unreasonable to expect us to wade through them if we don't at some point get a brief follow-up saying what the outcome (and possibly the root-cause) were, and in what timeframe, and how to avoid/fix this for other users, or else which alternative companies to use. And to requote the OP back to you like I did above, given that customer support told them there's a 24hr limit to that ban becoming permanent and tried to help them get it resolved before then, in this case it was in fact entirely reasonable to expect at least a one-line update within (in this specific case) a day, since either way the outcome would be known. And in fact here's the OP's followup post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34721870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34721870
tiew9Vii 4y ago
Cloudflare have posted a public blog post some days later https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-erroneously-throttled-a-customers-web-traffic/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-erroneously-throt...
tardis_thad 4y ago
Here's good summary of what happened https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34696763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34696763

by _vufv 4y ago

runnerup 4y ago

Would be nice if any parties which end up “using” HN to solve their customer service issues were somehow obligated to provide the community with a candid postmortem. That would be the right way to give back for customers using us as an amplifier and for corporations relying on us to be a shibboleth (a prefilter so providers know that this is a true issue unsolvable through existing support channels they have established for customers). Sharing these learnings with other potential founders would also be in line with the raison d’etre of HN. It would provide other founders with lessons they can takeaway and apply to their future startups to maybe do a few of these things right the first time around. For both sides, HN is “picking up slack” in the system and it would be right to support the community with candid postmortems.

dezb 4y ago

oh it is 100% entirely OK to share that you got screwed by a company .. this crap happens all the time.. companies like this get away with ZERO shits give about customer support all the time.. it is insane..

lolinder 4y ago
Not that this is true in this case, but a large number of HN support thread creators are very cagey about the nature of their business. I suspect a lot of the time they know they broke the ToS and are hoping that HN will get the pitchforks out to help them get their way regardless. Again, that doesn't seem to apply here, but I've stopped assuming that the existence of an HN support thread by itself shows malfeasance or incompetence on the part of the company.
- nightpool 4y ago
  Why "doesn't it seem to apply" that a blockchain scraping/data aggregation firm would be cagey about the nature of their business? I can't think of shakier grounds for a business to rest on, in two different dimensions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639879). (Reliance on customers not being sophisticated enough to set up API integrations themselves, reliance on blockchain as a failing segment of the market). Obviously it's not necessarily against Cloudflare's TOS to be a precarious business, but generally when a business' foundation is sketchy than it's more likely that more of the interactions they have with others are going to be sketchy.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    Is Zapier untrustworthy? ITTT? Microsoft with Flow? It’s absurd to think that somehow, just because someone works on tools that help people do things without code, that they’re somehow untrustworthy because of targeting “customers not sophisticated enough”. That’s insulting to both the service and their customers.
ndneighbor 4y ago
Unfortunately the norm in our industry, can't have "Cloud" margins without sacrificing something.

tardis_thad 4y ago

I'd be happy to provide more info but I have none. First I communicated with support which told me that my account was restricted most likely due to 2.8 clause violation (non html content) and suggested to contact with sales which I immediately did. Sales over the phone (was fastest) told me that it's good I contacted as otherwise in 24hours my account would be fully banned(whatever it means) and that they will prepare me an offer in 15 minutes, but it was taking longer (no response after an hour or so) and in the meanwhile I wrote Twitter and HN post which CTO of Cloudflare noticed and then after a while I've got another phone call from sales that I should update my ticket to ask unbanning my account as it was approved now by CTO which I did and that solved the issue at least for now - and that's it - no further info what the issue was, still waiting on Enterprise plan quote for me.

godzillabrennus 4y ago
Hilarious you got sales to call you back. I had to ping their CTO after multiple attempts to have sales work with me failed. He finally got them to give me a demo of their zero trust solution. No one ever followed up with me again though. It’s like they don’t want to sell an enterprise (tens of thousands of dollars a year) subscription… The only sales guy who called me back before the CTO got involved was Kingsley Okoroh out of their UK office. I’m in the states. He even had no idea why no one in the states would call me. Anyway, Kingsley tried hard to help, Kingsley should be their head of sales since no one else cares.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I've had only limited interaction with their sales people, but find it interesting they weren't on-the-ball trying to sell an account that valuable, either—we were more toward the bottom end of their enterprise range, so I'd just assumed we were too small-potatoes for them, but those were by far the least-hungry sales people I've ever interacted with. It was like I was bothering them. LOL. Also some of them seemed to know very little about their offerings, market segments, et c., which was weird. [EDIT] Oh, tens of K $ per year, not month. Yeah, that'd have been us, too. Mid tens of K $ per year.

NicoJuicy 4y ago

Cloudflare is really transparant about things ( eg. outages). Reality is that Cloudflare serves 60% of the internet and this issue popped up. They are checking it internally what happened, as I understand from jgrahamc.

nolok 4y ago
I don't think you realize it, but your answer while being wrong on many levels isn't even saying what you think it is saying. Reading your message, what one understands is "Cloudflare has so much on their hand you would be stupid to give them your business and think they would have time to deal with it", aka run away.
- NicoJuicy 4y ago
  That's not what it says. Having many employees means you need to improve processes sometimes. I actually don't know any businesses ( except solo ones) that don't have issues tbh. It's part of having employees. That cloudfare handles 60% of the internet, just makes the odds really high for someone to complain. It's resolved pretty quick and they are following up internally on what happened. And the OP mentioned himselve what the issue was fyi. Check his latest post. This whole thing is about someone bending the rules concerning CW and he knows it :)
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > This whole thing is about someone bending the rules concerning CW and he knows it :) Hell no. Using workers for non-html content is not "bending the rules". It's a normal and encouraged use case. And saying "I'm a heavy user, is that maybe part of it?" does not mean they did anything wrong. I don't see any signs of bending rules.
    - NicoJuicy 4y ago
      A very heavy user where they literally said "it could potentially work".

nullcaution 4y ago

> It's not OK to be like "HN I had a bad experience... That is rather aggressive?? Maybe thry live in another time zone and are asleep, or have other obligations like school pickup. Given them at least 24 hours to respond. sheesh...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
smcin 4y ago
Ok, but it's reasonable to suspect other users might also have had their accounts banned if it had been a systematic outage or ML hiccup, and given there's a 24hr limit to that ban becoming permanent, it's reasonable to expect an update soon as possible, even if that update is just a one-line "our status is X but we still don't know why this happened to us".
- nullcaution 4y ago
  What? no. On the flip side what if their company is convulsing at the possibility of being offline for a few days due to the issue, updating a HN post would be their lowest priority untill they find a solution. Give them a break, OP owes us nothing.
  - smcin 4y ago
    Noone said it was their highest priority. But given that HN has a daily stream of horror-stories/complaints from SaaS/cloud/payment users, it would be unreasonable to expect us to wade through them if we don't at some point get a brief follow-up saying what the outcome (and possibly the root-cause) were, and in what timeframe, and how to avoid/fix this for other users, or else which alternative companies to use. And to requote the OP back to you like I did above, given that customer support told them there's a 24hr limit to that ban becoming permanent and tried to help them get it resolved before then, in this case it was in fact entirely reasonable to expect at least a one-line update within (in this specific case) a day, since either way the outcome would be known. And in fact here's the OP's followup post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34721870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34721870

tiew9Vii 4y ago

Cloudflare have posted a public blog post some days later https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-erroneously-throttled-a-customers-web-traffic/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-erroneously-throt...

tardis_thad 4y ago

Here's good summary of what happened https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34696763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34696763