I do wonder; when a domain is suspended, why don't you send out a courtesy notification e-mail?

what if their email address is @ the domain

Even if cloudflare stopped publishing the correct MX records for a domain, wouldn't Cloudflare still be able to send email to the MX server that had been specified? Seems like email should at worst be down for everyone but Cloudflare.

Well, that's poor planning on the user's part. In this case the OP stated he registered using a gmail address.

If the only contact information the registrar has is the @ of the domain then that likely mean that the registrar is failing the contractual obligations that exist between the registry and registrar. While I have not read the exact contract that exist for .com registrars, I am confident enough to say that you can not do that.

The OP made it clear that he used a gmail account for contact so there was no excuse for him to have not received a message regarding the deletion of his domain records.

I think it's pretty common advice that anything domain-related needs to be a different email. I've heard that, and I've only ever admin'd my personal domain. For exactly that reason I registered for Cloudflare with a gmail account.

Also display a prominent notification in the web interface then.

I appreciate you're looking in to this.

I’ve worked for Cloudflare since it was 24 people. I care a hell of a lot about our customers. I know eastdakota does also.

I can tell. Cloudflare has been a delight to use up to now and I'm grateful I'm getting this kind of support when I've only used your loss-leader services.

This is probably obvious but you're getting this kind of support because they're getting terrible PR by virtue of your post being at the top of HN. Not because he's such a great guy that cares so much about the customers. Not saying he isn't a great guy, or that anyone at cloudflare actually wanted this to be your experience.

If he’d emailed me directly I would have done the same thing I did. I emailed the head of engineering and support and asked for an explanation. I then jumped into the relevant chat room.

I do this sort of thing all the time. Sure, it’s unfortunate this is #1 on HN, but shrug. Fixing the problem and figured out what happened is important.

The more important question is what will be done to prevent this from happening again to somebody else (obviously this doesn’t need a response here, I assume an internal investigation is underway and this will be publicly communicated after its complete).

Hi John, your website's contact link is pointing to your twitter account and you don't have messages opened.

What is the best email to reach out to you?

Thank you.

How was he supposed to know to email you?

I don't think he's saying that OP should've known to email him, just that he would've done the same thing over private emails where nobody was watching, as he is doing here publicly.

To be fair this seems to happen with a bunch of tech companies, such as Stripe too. I wish more companies took customer support seriously.

I remember about 4-5 months ago I spent like 2 weeks going back and forth with Stripe's regular email support trying to understand their docs for SCA.

I kept getting a new rep who repeated the same things the previous reps were saying, which also had no bearing on what I was asking. It was basically a copy / paste from a script loop.

Then something negative about Stripe was on the HN front page and I happened to comment about a bad experience with the new SCA docs.

Within a few hours I was put in contact with a lead developer from Stripe who went as far as creating custom flow charts for my use case that wasn't covered in the docs and it was a pleasant experience, where "pleasant" felt like the person receiving the email was reading the words I wrote instead of just skimming them and pasting a boilerplate response.

But it only happened because of the HN comment. If that thread never appeared on HN, I'm not even sure I would still be using Stripe.

> was a pleasant experience, where "pleasant" felt like the person receiving the email was reading the words I wrote instead of just skimming them and pasting a boilerplate response.

Crazy how far down the bar has gone.

With many other companies I would agree with you, but in this case it is actually just because he's running a tight ship. I've had friends who've reached out directly via email and received the same level of support.

You mention loss-leader services, but the model is no doubt setup to funnel you towards profitable services.

I switched a personal domain to them, but it won't be long before I get my employer to move their resources over to them, assuming I see this all play out well.

John, you guys seem pretty awesome about posting root cause analysis and being transparent, can we expect to see at least a comment (if not a blog post) summarizing what took place here?