Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#331

Post by bigiain » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 12:46 AM UTC

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…

> 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?

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#332

Post by phyzome » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 12:47 AM UTC

Jerry2 wrote: post #44

whatthesmack wrote: post #2

This is frightening. I just started the process of moving all ~60 of my domains from Amazon Registrar + Google Cloud DNS to Cloudflare, and will definitely wait until somebody from Cloudflare chimes in here to clarify what's going on.

> moving all ~60 of my domains from Amazon Registrar + Google Cloud DNS to Cloudflare You're very brave considering that Cloudflare doesn't even have U2F yet Google and Amazon do.

Amazon doesn't allow multiple U2F. D-:

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#333

Post by bigiain » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 12:49 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #321

DangerousPie wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't sound like it actually deleted anything other than the DNS entries. It's not like any actual data got lost.

I dunno, but DNS entries are actual data. I certainly don’t know what all the DNs entries on my 15 domains are, so if they disappear it’s not going to be easy to get it all back.

> I certainly don’t know what all the DNs entries on my 15 domains are, so if they disappear it’s not going to be easy to get it all back.

I hope for your sake that right now you are fixing that problem?

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#334

Post by gjs278 » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 12:50 AM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #124

pmlnr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this is relevant.

You listed their good points, the other poster listed some counterpoints. The one post is no less relevant than the other in a discussion about possible DNS hosting options IMO. Though I think the post would benefit from some citations to improve its relevance/usefulness otherwise it is little better than personal opinion/conjecture. Unless you are specifically questioning the relevance of hosting spammers, on which…

literally nobody cares. every cloud host gets blocked for spam. type less next time you could have said what you meant in 12 words.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#335

Post by iratewizard » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 12:52 AM UTC

nickjj wrote: post #313

TylerE wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that isn't a useful allocation of resources. Support that powerful are going to basically be devs. With dev salary expectations.

I think it's useful and it's very much worth it to give support a salary where they are enthusiastic to be employed. If someone uses your product or service and has an issue, the first contact they have with your company is through support. A crappy support experience could easily be the difference between having a life time customer valued at thousands of dollars, or your customer feeling frustrated and going to ano…

Airbnb is a great example of both. If you call tech support and get India, hang up. If you're lucky they're useless. If you're unlucky, they're going against your direct command and contacting the drug dealers in your house about a complaint. Contrast that to reaching one of the many on-shore agents who do their jobs well. One call, one or two people max and the issue is mostly resolved.

I've got no idea what the cause is. It's probably a mix of poor management, ineffective metrics, low salaries and a work culture in India which isn't synonymous with quality. The bottom line is, even the same company can be doing support wonderfully and terribly at the same time.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#336

Post by diegoperini » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 12:54 AM UTC

dboreham wrote: post #303

diegoperini wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then I'd like to know the CEO's opinion then.

CTO of any company doesn't need the CEO's permission to make a customer relations post.

It's not about permission but cooperation of two disciplines.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#337

Post by gregd » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 12:55 AM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #324

gregd wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A properly setup helpdesk negates the need for an Ombudsman. If a tech company cannot get a helpdesk escalation path correct, what makes you think they'll get an Ombudsman scenario correct?

Ombudsman services are able to resolve conflicts where the customer and business don't agree. They're appropriate for regulated businesses to draw a line in the sand as to what is a legitimate complaint by independently settling cases where the customer and business did not agree. If the Ombudsman hears 100 unresolved complaints and upholds only one then probably the ordinary customer services are working as intended…

I've worked for various technical help desks over the past 20 years and I'm saying that if a help desk is setup properly, ombudsman services become unnecessary.

A big part of this is how empowered you make your various levels. The SLAs I've always worked with, created, and worked under measured time on calls and customer satisfaction was always one of the more important measurements.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#338

Post by diegoperini » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 1:10 AM UTC

diegoperini wrote: post #281

stedaniels wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jgrahamc is the CTO of Cloudflare. His only supervisor is eastdakota/ Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare.

Then I'd like to know the CEO's opinion then.

It's hard to understand criticism when it is not put into words.

From my perspective, a developer from the company the article is about arrives in the comment section. I ask an honest question about the communication process internal to the company. I am told this developer is the CTO and is supervised by the CEO. Then I state the fact that I would appreciate if we also knew what the CEO thinks about this situation.

I don't literally expect answers from the people I addressed and that's OK, they are probably too busy working on the subject matter. If they take time and write one, that is really admirable and I'd be thankful.

What I don't understand is why it is considered inappropriate to be curious about these topics, as judged by the amount of downvotes I received.

Maybe the tone I intended for my post got lost in translation, since I'm not a native English speaker.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#339

Post by JakeTheAndroid » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 1:11 AM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #308

iudqnolq wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

Re: Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

#340

Post by iudqnolq » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 1:16 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #316

iudqnolq wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'd be fine with that? I would trust Cloudflare to pay me back, and I'm already putting something on the line. If it really was my fault this is going to be very embarrassing. Edit: In case it isn't clear from context I'm the OP so I'm pretty sure I know what I feel.

Except you can bet that a lot of cases will end up with a battle of back and forth emails arguing over whose fault it was and who should pay the $100. The vast majority of support tickets are the customers 'fault'. They'll be things like setting up DNS records incorrectly, believing they don't need to pay a renewal with their old registrar just because they moved their DNS over to cloudflare, frustrations over cached…

(op here) My belief is that I completely transfered everything to cloudflare, paid in advance, and didn't touch it. If this was as much my fault as any of the common tickets you listed I will deeply regret having posted this and will apologise to Cloudflare.