Ask HN: Anyone know how to reach Cloudflare support? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone know how to reach Cloudflare support?

7 pointsOhMeadhbh6 comments

So I have a paid account w/ CloudFlare, but I can't seem to reach their support people.

I've also noticed that half the Internet is blocked from my IP. Not sure why. Work uses BT to distribute customized Debian images, though as far as I can tell none of these images have copyrighted material in them. Maybe my ISP is telling CloudFlare I'm a bad person me 'cause it sees BT and doesn't care that it can't find evidence of copyright infringement?

So about half the time, the CloudFlare dashboard is blocked with a message saying I should email the site I'm trying to reach and get them to unblock me. But it's CloudFlare I'm trying to reach and their support people don't respond (even if I try to email them.)

I mean... I guess it's time to move to Akamai. But CloudFlare's still poisoned my IP.

Also... seems like if a CDN is going to block access to a site's data and say "email the site to get access restored" they would have an email address you can use to do that. If I have to go to the web site to find out what the email address I have to send a message to and that site is blocked...

Am I supposed to pay CloudFlare for the privilege of not being blocked by people who use their service? Has it become a protection racket?

Anyway... if anyone knows how to get ahold of CloudFlare support, maybe by phone(?), that would be appreciated.

I've sent this post to some folks at Cloudflare.

thx! just noticed it's happening with my personal account as well (a free account for my vanity site) so it looks like my IP address (or maybe my small ISP's ASN) got blackholed.

Looks like it's better now... I can get back into the dashboard for work and personal accounts. (And I double checked against https://jgc.org/ and https://www.amctheatres.com/ as random sites behind CloudFlare, and they seem to work.)

I don't know if it's cause some support person saw John's request or if it was just a random thing that fixed itself. But if say... one third of the top 1000 web sites are behind CloudFlare and CloudFlare only has five-nines, that probably means tens of thousands of people are getting false positives every day.

I understand wanting to defend against bad guys, but if there's no way to contact CloudFlare support because CloudFlare blocked you from contacting their support... Though... yeah... I was able to get in to the support portal on my mobile phone. There's got to be a better way.

I'll likely be at IETF 124 if any CF folk want to spitball ideas about making the experience less bad.

HN support strikes again

Can you email cto@cloudflare.com with details and will get escalated.

Just as a FYI... I got an email back from CF's CTO. So... at least they're looking into it. I'm on a smaller ISP and I wonder if their AS got blackmarks for not sufficiently blocking spammers or botnets.

And if this happens to you, be sure to record as much data as you can. I sort of spaced and didn't record the Ray ID on the error page. I think that would have helped a great deal in debugging the problem.

And yes... their AI generated response is sort of horrible, but... well... it's an automated response. I'm not going to ding CF for that. Everyone's automated responses are horrible.

I went into this wanting to be uncharitable to CF, but they seem to be taking it serious, so kudos to them.

[Edit. Lol - didn't look close enough. I think dknecht is the current CTO. So... props to you for taking it seriously.]

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