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Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

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Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#221

Post by kortilla »

cabaalis wrote: post #196
inetknght wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. It shouldn't be necessary for someone to know who's-who in order to get things resolved.

You may be right, but knowing "who's who" is very largely how general business gets done. Buying services over the internet from an anonymous black box with no support is a recent disruption.

No, normally you didn’t have to know someone in the C suite to “get business done”. That’s totally unscalable.

What’s a recent development is the complete lack of support when shit goes south. Back when you were interacting with real reps you had people that could see when stuff was obviously wrong and escalate appropriately.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#222

Post by isclever »

iudqnolq wrote: post #75
woofcat wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't see how that helps. How do I recover from my registrar deleting/disabling my account even if DNS is somewhere else? I think there's still only one failure point and the lesson is that I need to pay that failure point more money. Your outage was a DNS outage, not a registrar outage. If you still had control of the domain you could update your name servers to another provider, import your backed up records and…

> Your outage was a DNS outage, not a registrar outage. If you still had control of the domain you could update your name servers to another provider, import your backed up records and get the site back online without talking to CloudFlare. I believe it was both. If I have a registrar outage I'm hosed. If I don't have a registrar outage and do have a DNS outage I can recover with a little work. But in the only case I…

A domain registered at a provider (but not DNS) can be down with no impact to your domain, so long as the domain is still in the TLD root servers, everything will keep going.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#223

Post by tracker1 »

bithaze wrote: post #188
iudqnolq wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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 quest…

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.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#224

Post by basch »

iudqnolq wrote: post #146
gist wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Technology companies need an "ombudsman" - a contact that customers can go to when the normal tech support processes have failed. From what I read this is nothing to indicate the process failed (so far) just that the user decided to skip to the head of the line by writing a blog post internet style to get something resolved and attention. Failed is not 'I didn't get a reply or find what I needed as quickly as I thi…

The core of what you say is correct. I posted about this publicly with two goals in mind: getting help from someone at cloudflare and getting advice on how to avoid this sort of issue from the HN community. From my perspective Cloudflare's process did fail. Assuming I didn't do something insanely dumb and what I think happened did happen, I would consider that a failure on its own even if the support was perfect afte…

Ive run into Cloudflare admin pages that fail with ad blocking before. Test your theory in a private session, it works for me when their site "has issues."

(I think in my case it was adding google metrics from the apps page.)

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#225

Post by wyoh »

mavhc wrote: post #61
potency wrote: post #53

Cloudflare lost my support when they started de-platforming people for holding opinions they didn't agree with. Censorship outside of strictly legal bounds should not be tolerated from a company as powerful as Cloudflare.

Is it censorship if they refuse their money for a service? Pretty sure that's just business. Are they stopping you having a website?

Would you be OK with your phone provider or imternet provider to stop doing business with because you said some unsavory thing to a friend or have blog supporting the wrong candidate?

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#226

Post by lubujackson »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #215
awill wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really great idea, but I don't think it's possible for this to not get overused for every little issue. Once it's overused, it becomes useless.

I like the setup my bank's Ombudsman has -- you must first take your issue to first level support, then escalate it with them if not resolved. If the second level of support denies you, then and only then can you reach out to the Ombudsman. Any requests that haven't gone through the proper process get auto-rejected.

That is the logical way for things to work, but it requires first level tech support letting you escalate, which is not always the case with non-bank industries.

The current go-to move is to tweet a complaint at the company's Twitter account. This is surprisingly effective across multiple industries and actually was something my wife did that helped resolve a time-sensitive AirBnB issue.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#227

Post by nexuist »

awill wrote: post #152
andrewstuart wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've put this idea forward a number of times here on HN in regards to other big tech companies. Technology companies need an "ombudsman" - a contact that customers can go to when the normal tech support processes have failed. The Ombudsman must not be part of the technology companies ordinary support processes, it must be entirely separate, and have highest level authority to demand action within the company. To avoi…

This is a really great idea, but I don't think it's possible for this to not get overused for every little issue. Once it's overused, it becomes useless.

Isn't this the point of the monetary hold? You can just raise it until the amount of entries become manageable. I'm sure higher level orgs would easily put down $10k to talk to a developer at Microsoft. For indie devs, numbers like $100 or $1000 could be manageable, as long as they can trigger the refund and close the case whenever they want.

Arguably this does block out poorer people from receiving "special" customer service, but there are not really other things people are willing to lose (or put up as collateral) for this type of service. I can't really ship Cloudflare my toaster or car until they resolve my case.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#228

Post by mark_and_sweep »

SahAssar wrote: post #211
mark_and_sweep wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not Firefox becoming less and less viable. This is developers caring less and less about supporting older browsers, less capable hardware and, I guess, long-term maintenance in general. Just had a similar case today: My Mom tried to order something online on her old Android tablet - and it didn't work. She blamed the tablet for it, saying "It's just too old, it doesn't work correctly anymore! I used to be abl…

Well, it's also a problem of device manufacturers dropping support for devices too quickly. There are still android 4.1 devices sold on amazon, and you really can't expect web developers to support that. The manufacturer should be required to support it for the full lifetime of the device. Especially since your mom uses it to order stuff, which usually includes some pretty security sensitive information. I think you…

Well, I haven't analysed the exact technical reason for why submitting the order failed. But I'm pretty certain that submitting a HTML form is a solved problem in web development.. Or at least it should be. I haven't tried submitting a form with an async fetch from a web worker that communicates with a redux store implemented in WebAssembly yet (or whatever that web app is doing..).

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#229

Post by craftinator »

djsumdog wrote: post #17

I really had a strong dislike for Cloudflare after they banned certain customers for political reasons[1]. The CEO mentioned how maybe it wasn't the right thing to do .. and then they did it again. There aren't really any self-hosted solutions for DDoS protection like Cloudflare since it requires things happening in the network layer. Implementing a solution would require access to monitor and reshape the local netwo…

If you run a restaurant, you can refuse to do business with anyone you choose. If that was not the case, you would effectively be a slave; unable to choose actions for yourself and your business. Cloudflare refused to do business with people and content; that is their prerogative.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#230

Post by wolco »

johnklos wrote: post #101
pmlnr wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digitalocean has free dns service with an api; it's good and reliable. Running my own dns looks more and more reasonable though.

Perhaps, but Digital Ocean also host spammers / scammers and doesn't do anything about them when they're reported.

Are you saying if you use their dns you will get spammed/scammed?
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