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.
Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h
Yikes. That sounds bad.
I’m a SysOps engineer at a fairly large online casino.
Okay all my sympathy is gone. Online casinos deserve to die.
That said, my feelings towards economic vampires aside, the way the events unfolded is concerning to say the least. Cloudflare has been racking up evil-corp points quite rapidly in recent months.
As a person who works in server hosting (not as devops or IT), I’m often privy to customer interactions. I feel like my company does a really good job at damage control - where if we fuck up, some rep gets on the phone and makes things right. We’ve eaten costs on behalf of our customers.
But sometimes, you just gotta tell a customer to go fuck themselves.
And those customers, those biggest complainers are often in online gambling, crypto, adult content, or racist shit.
We get DDos’d a lot from it. But I’m glad the company I work for doesn’t bow down to garbage companies.
I’m honestly not surprised.
I used to hook up with a guy who was 100% convinced that he could game the system. It had something to do with break frequencies from various services and certain time windows for playing. He won sometimes, but he obviously didn’t talk much about his losses. He wasn’t a very happy person, and I think gambling offered an easy release.
That’s my big issue with gambling. It’s a business preying on addicts leaving many in financial ruin, and overall they do nothing for society at large. Here in Sweden it is regulated, but you honestly don’t notice it. There are so many internet casinos vanishing and cropping up on an almost daily basis. If you turn on the radio the adverts are like 40% online casinos, 40% sex toy sites, and 20% various services, like tyre shifting, glass repairs, etc.
A lot of those exploit EU rules on open markets to dodge proper local licensing (I’m also from Sweden)
I despise gambling, I don’t gamble myself and I consider it a tax on those who don’t know math. That said, I worked for a gambling company and I know that different companies target different types of customers. Also they have responsible gambling programs that are more or less serious (some of which might be required by regulations). The company I worked for operated in Scandinavia and was sportsbook heavy (vs casino heavy), and had quite serious measures against suspected addicts (immediate block, calling the person on the phone if there were any signs like long sessions etc., proof of income to set limits proportional to income etc.), because it was considered bad for business. Many companies in general are terrible, and especially those who depend on casino games, where the margins are fixed and the dynamics are more prone to create addiction (available 24/7, quick feedback etc.).
If it’s providing games of skill like online poker, it’s actually a very intellectually stimulating game. People have made a ton of instructional videos and many books on the poker variations.
After playing poker professionally I was able to leverage the skills of bankroll management and emotional control to become successful in investing in the stock market.
I held all of my stocks through the entire pandemic to rebound from a loss over multiple years holding tech to a $600,000 profit by buying at the bottom. If I hadn’t played poker I probably wouldn’t be able to stomach looking at a six digit loss in 2021. I only sold my bonds which I used to buy more stocks at a cheaper price (which was the point of the bond allocation)
I used to be in credit risk for a very large stock market company.
Calling the bottom of the market is the same as betting big and getting 21 in blackjack.
Super cool when it happens, but not skill. The number of grown men I had to hear crying because they were dollar cost averaging down to the bottom until they went broke still disturbs me.
I’m happy this worked for you, but it was not skill.
You can’t go broke with 1x leverage, and I bought $AMD all the way down from $100 to $70
If it went to $50 I wouldn’t go broke, if it went $1 I wouldn’t go broke. I just would have missed a bigger opportunity
I’m really glad for you, that sounds amazing. I don’t think you’re the rule, though. I think you’re the exception. I also feel like it wouldn’t be unfeasible to have competitive/e-sports poker while still strictly regulating online casinos.
Is it really so crazy that if you practice gambling you might end up good at gambling? I dont see any difference between playing the stock market and playing cards for money.
Yes, that’s the point, I’m good at combinatorics, probability. These mathematical skills have a lot of carryover
Jesus. Something shady is happening with cloudflare.
That does not inspire confidence.
Is there? The casino is on a cheap $250 a month plan they don’t belong on and they broke ToS with the domains. While also costing Cloudflare money each month (as the casino admits themselves, their traffic alone is worth up to $2000 a month).
It’s absolutely in the right of Cloudflare to drop a customer that’s bothersome. Casinos usually are (regulations, going around country restrictions), them costing them money on top is a massive issue.
120k a year is a big slap of course, but it’s probably the amount Cloudflare would want to keep them on as a customer. If they leave, so be it.
I’ve seen it several times before at companies I worked at. They cheaped out and went with a tiny service plan to coast by. Or even broke ToS because it would be cheaper. That usually got stopped by plans getting dropped (GitLab Bronze for example), cheap plans getting limited, or the sales team sending a ‘friendly’ message that we’re abusing their plan and how we’re going to fix it. If you don’t play along at that point you’re going to get the hammer dropped on you.
It also wasn’t 24h as the title says, the first communication happened in April. At that point they should have started to scramble, either upgrading to a bigger tier immediately or switching providers. And it’s totally normal to go to the sales team when you break the ToS of your plan or you abuse a smaller plan. They’re going to discuss terms, it’s not a technical issue.
Edit: And I should also say, the whole “paying for a whole year is extortion” is bullshit too. Their CFO or CEO told Cloudflare they are looking at switching providers (as they looked at Fastly). So of fucking course Cloudflare is going to demand a full year upfront. Otherwise the casino could pay for a single month and during that month they switch away to another provider. So Cloudflare would still be thousands in the red with that ex-customer after they used so much traffic the last few years.
That Cloudflare were justifiably unhappy with the situation and wanted to take action is fine.
What’s not fine is how they approached that problem.
In my opinion, the right thing for Cloudflare to do would have been to have an open and honest conversation and set clear expectations and dates.
Example:
"We have recently conducted a review of your account and found your usage pattern far exceeds the expected levels for your plan. This usage is not sustainable for us, and to continue to provide you with service we must move you to plan x at a cost of y.
If no agreement is reached by [date x] your service will be suspended on [date y]."
Clear deadlines and clear expectations. Doesn’t that sound a lot better than giving someone the run-around, and then childishly pulling the plug when a competitor’s name is mentioned?
Considering the perspective of the poster, the misleading title, etc - are you actually sure they didn’t?
From the additional info I read, it sounds more like the traffic wasn’t the main issue.
Gambling is forbidden in a lot of countries or heavily regulated. Cloudflare uses a common IP pool for all customers, so a casino customer would possibly get their IPs blacklisted (by various ISPs). The Enterprise tier of Cloudflare has “Bring your own IP (ByoIP)”, which they probably wanted to force onto this problematic customer to protect their business.
So it’s actually a problem, not just them paying not enough (which is another reason to get rid of them as fast as possible).
The first communications were intentionally misleading though. CF wasn’t trying to solve a problem, they were trying to sell a service. If CF had just led with “upgrade or we nuke your site” then that’s scummy, but fair. Leading these guys on about technical problems and “trust & safety” bullshit was not fair at all.
There were 3 issues at once, so “trust & safety” is definitely part of it.
- Too much traffic use, this is purely a billing issue and CF probably wouldn’t even care (they haven’t for years) despite losing money
- Violating ToS with the domains, a minor infraction probably, but enough to cancel the contract
- This is the big one: CF uses one pool of IPs for all customers, the IP of a gambling site (like a casino) will get banned by ISPs of various countries (Gambling being illegal, strictly regulated and so on). This is the trust & safety issue, CF is actively hurting by keeping this customer. The enterprise plan they want to push them to has ByoIP (Bring your own IP), which would probably have been one condition of keeping them on. CF could have communicated better (if we got the full story here…), but for $250 a month they’d much rather kick the customer off their service
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
CloudFlare don’t need to subsidise an online casino with millions of subscribers, at everyone else’s expense. Sure CF are a bunch of gigglefucks but this time I think they made a good decision.
Unless the casino is doing something illegal, it’s really not their decision to make. If they don’t want to subsidize them, all they’d have to do is be transparent and fair in their pricing. They way CF handled it instead just seems unprofessional and deceitful.
$0 is better than having a customer whose costs exceed their revenue; it looks like the bad press is being managed; and also fuck online casinos very much.
I read the post and it doesn’t sound abusive at all
Plus: cloudflare kept putting them in touch with the sales department. Not legal. Not technical support
It’s just shit customer service, even if the customer is making a ton of money compared to your fees. Should a casino pay more for other services, too, just because they" don’t need a subsidy"?
As strange as this may sound… if you’re having serious technical problems, it’s the sales team you want to talk to.
Sales people have way more pull at tech companies than the engineering teams do. If your sales rep sounds an alarm, people listen. When tech support sounds an alarm, nobody bats an eye.
In this particular situation, they should be reaching out to cloudflare’s legal team. But, with their own legal team.
Subsidise how? They were using their existing plan as intended and even willing ditch the grey-area parts. If CF cannot afford to offer their plans as they are, they should change the offered plans, not hunt for easy prey.
Clearly CF were losing money on this account, so their other customers were subsidising.
Ah fuck it, I’m clearly at the bottom of a dog pile here, and I don’t want to be friends with any of you, nor am I going to start thinking that an online casino deserves anything but contempt, so I’ll be off.
Found the thread on HN. Here’s what (I’m guessing) a mod had to say:
It set off the flamewar detector, got flagged by users, and got downweighted by a mod.
The ‘customer support of last resort’ genre is common and not usually a good fit for HN [1]. If people feel this story is unusually relevant and interesting, I’m not sure I agree—long experience has taught us that one-sided articles like this nearly always leave out critical information—but I also don’t mind yielding in an occasional specific case, so I’ve rolled back the penalties on this thread.
The issue from our point of view is not about story X or company Y—it’s a systemic one: the most popular genres of submission (especially the rage-inducing ones) get massively over-represented by default, so countervailing mechanisms are needed [2] if we’re to have a space for the more intellectually curious stories that the site is meant for.
HN thread is here and it’s on the front page 7 hours old: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808
Many mentions made that a significant part of the issue seemed to be Cloudflare IP addresses getting banned in some countries. They wanted the customer to switch to a bring-your-own-IP plan.
Also, the discussion took place over 1 month, not 24 hours.
I think the HN thread is reasonably informative and nuanced. CF didn’t do great but it was somewhat a fog of war situation.
The irony here, is this is the kind of vague and obtuse fuckery online casinos and sportsbooks pull with their customers all the time.
The irony here is that the article author confirms that they break TOS of CF and he still has a Pikachu face. Reddit discussion is pretty positive that CF is right in their decision and that new provider will shut them down at some time as well.
even if they were breaking tos (and i don’t think it sounds quite so cut and dry), shouldn’t the response be to notify them and allow them to fix it, or just terminate the account? demanding a ton of money to make the problem seems a skeevy way of handling it on cloudflare’s part.
