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 and their main login may have failed in Firefox (with all tracking prevention and ad blockers disabled).

I felt that if a company invites me to ask for support publicly on their forum to save on customer support costs it's reasonable to talk about the issue in another public place.

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 question or something account-specific, by all means, open a ticket. There you'll get replies from people who can look up your account and give you specific answers.

The ombudsman tip in this post doesn't make a whole lot of sense when the normal support process wasn't really given a chance before making the blog post.

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.

(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.

> 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?

And then/also submitted a support ticket, unless I'm misunderstanding their post?

> I spent some time thinking about if it was fair for me to post this on the same day as I filed a support ticket with Cloudflare.

I think it is a bit harsh to say that the OP was trying to shame anyone. He did post a support ticket. When your domain is "off-line" it is literally a shit hit the fan moment, and no one likes to be given the run-around.

To combat, hey my issue is always a Sev1 ticket, one can probably institute something like, here is a red button and if you click it, we will charge 100$. If it is indeed an issue that caused you to lose 90%(say) traffic and it was our fault, we will return the money.

Microsoft used to have this policy (maybe still does) for some support options. It cost $100 to open a case, and if the case was the result of a bug in the product, you got your money back.

Imagine how you would feel though if you were in OP’s shoes, where your DNS entries disappeared and client emails lost, through no fault of your own, but support won’t even listen to you until you pay money.

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 resources, etc.

(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.

In the blog post he mentions that Cloudflare recommends posting your problem to their open community forum to try and get things resolved. He couldn't access their forum, so he posted it on a different one.

And maybe not too.