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Comment by iudqnolq | Hacker News Reader

I address this in TFA.

Essentially I felt that this was alright because when I filed a ticket I was informed that I should expect a long wait and that they recommend that their non-business customers post publicly on their support forum for crowdsourced support because that leads to faster replies. I was unable to log into that forum, and I suspect that may be because the way they set up SSO between the forum login and their main login may have failed in Firefox (with all tracking prevention and ad blockers disabled).

I felt that if a company invites me to ask for support publicly on their forum to save on customer support costs it's reasonable to talk about the issue in another public place.

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Oh, the horror of recommending a public forum. (/s, of course.)

A fair number of questions aren't unique - product questions, how to use an API, etc. Someone may have asked a similar question, in which case you'll find an answer, find it faster than it'll take to hear back from the support team, and it deflects an unnecessary (already answered) ticket. That should be a win all around.

Now if you do have a novel question or something account-specific, by all means, open a ticket. There you'll get replies from people who can look up your account and give you specific answers.

The ombudsman tip in this post doesn't make a whole lot of sense when the normal support process wasn't really given a chance before making the blog post.

When your entire site and suite of applications are offline, especially during business hours, waiting who knows how long for a support queue isn't really an option. Outages like this can kill a business or cost millions.

(op here). To be fair to Cloudflare a business with millions on the line should be paying a lot more money to Cloudflare than I, a college student with significantly less on the line, would. If I had the option to pay $1,000 right now and get everything back up instantly I wouldn't take it because it isn't worth that much to me.

I realize that... the issue isn't necessarily tethered to your paying status, and it could just as easily happen to someone with a high value business account.

This is unlikely for a few reasons.

1. If you write into support as an Enterprise customer, you're basically getting an automatic response.

2. Enterprise customers can dial a direct line to support and have this under investigation within minutes.

3. Enterprise customer have a dedicated account manager, and in most cases a Solutions Engineer helped get everything setup. Usually Enterprise domains get locked, so they cannot get caught by linting type services. The likelihood of a domain being removed under those conditions is very low.

4. The most common cause of this type of thing is the Name Servers no longer pointing to Cloudflare, no one noticing for a while. Cloudflare periodically checks to see if a domain is still using CF name servers, and if they aren't they get moved as the assumption is they are no longer on Cloudflare. I don't know that this is what happened here, but it's easily the most common issue on lower tier plans. Enterprise companies often have people monitoring their infra, thus they catch this before Cloudflare conducts the removal of the domain.

Source: used to work on the Cloudflare support team.

> Oh, the horror of recommending a public forum. (/s, of course.)

He _tried_ to request help in their recommended public forum, but could not due to login issues.

Seems entirely reasonable to me to then go and ask about out in a different public forum?

And then/also submitted a support ticket, unless I'm misunderstanding their post?

> I spent some time thinking about if it was fair for me to post this on the same day as I filed a support ticket with Cloudflare.

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