What if this had been Akamai and not Cloudflare? Would we even hear about it? Why is Cloudflare in the news regularly and never Akamai? Do they just like drama? Is that good or bad for their business?
That said they're interesting articles if you ignore the hype.
Cloudflare differs from most DDOS mitigation companies because of their low-dollar, self-service tier. This gives them a reason to blog, and customers and attacks to talk about. Most DDOS companies only provide bespoke service for $$$, and those contracts usually come with silence requirements.
Akamai is not 2nd on the list of DDOS mitigation companies, BTW. I know a couple companies who left Akamai for DOS Arrest, one of great companies you'll never see mentioned in a NYTimes article (because that's how their customer want it).
I'm somewhat skeptical of CloudFlare's low-cost approach to DDoS mitigation. Going for volume on low MRC clients means that you have a lot of potential targets on your network. And attacks against any one customer can always impact every other customer, which puts you constantly at risk, even if you yourself are not attacked all that often.
In my mind, this is similar to an antivirus company saying "hey look at all these nasty viruses out there, but we find and destroy them effectively."
This really just seems like effective case-studying on CF's part. It's arguably their job to hype it as much as possible (though of course they are responsible for the inaccuracies).
Akamai has been around since 1998.
Cloudflare since 2009 (both according according to crunchbase which jives with the date the domain were registered iim).
Consequently the established company has more to lose and less to gain from the publicity then the newer company.
For a newer company any publicity is good publicity even if it's over a negative event because you have less to lose and more to gain add: and people become familiar with your name.
Taking this to an extreme example (to make a point) let's say you start a new hamburger restaurant. You have no customers. On day 5 some people get sick (just sick not deathly sick). All the sudden you are in the local paper with a headline and a story that people just skim but they see your name. Almost guaranteed you will pick up business from the mention. Even though it's bad PR all the sudden down the road people will remember you and either forget or not care about the negative story they read 6 mos. prior (add: assuming they even read the story and didn't just see the headline).
Remember Akamai is the Oracle of the CDN world. They're in a bit of a shuffle right now as their competitors have long caught up and offer the same for less, minus the legendary Akamai-arrogance.
Akamai sees their market shrink from both ends. At the top-end companies like Netflix start building their own networks because they want more control, less reliance on a third-party, and the cost savings. At the low-end you have pseudo-CDNs like Cloudflare eat into their snake-oil business, and commodity-CDNs like Cloudfront grab the longtail.
Connectivity in US/EU has also gotten so good on average (and bandwidth so cheap) that the body of mid-range sites that feel a genuine need to enter an expensive conversation with a "traditional" CDN is evaporating. And this is doubly true for Akamai where that conversation tends to be particularly unpleasant.
Akamai and friends are of course well aware and have long shifted their focus to the emerging markets (asia, africa) and mobile. Time will tell for how long that can keep them afloat before they are marginalized.
I'd upvote such an article if it had the technical depth/layman readability of a Cloudflare puff piece.