Dear John. What am I — as a normal human being/end-user — supposed to do in this situation? People can’t do anything without any information about why they’re blocked. Who do you contact? Where do you go? What to do? The challenge page doesn’t help the end user understand why this is happening to them. It’s okay if you only see it for two seconds. But the page stays on screen for over a minute. When this happens for every website — what do you do? You’d be furious if this had happen to you. I’m just trying to read my online comics and lookup some stuff about some interests and hobbies. It reduced my quality of life/sanity for a week. The last two days, I started worrying that this was going to be the new normal. I even looked into swapping ISP to get a new IP address.

PS: I love all the innovation and engineering stuff you guys regularly share on the Cloudflare blog. It’s [almost] always an interesting read. Even though I’m no fan of the massive centralization your company has caused.

Once upon a time Matthew made us set the IP reputation of every Cloudflare office to bad so that we experienced the worst case scenario. Helped a lot.

I don’t understand why you saw one minute block screens. That’s not right. Should be seconds.

I’m talking with the team about your other points.

The main problem of course, and it isn’t limited to Cloudflare and I won’t pretend to have the solution, is that if you are caught in this kind of web, you have no recourse but go public and hope the spotlight lands on you. For every problem we see in an upvoted post there’s tons that nobody sees.

What about answering his actual question?

I haven't been getting challenges that last that long, but I have noticed that the redesigned "security check" challenge pages with the spinner do seem much slower than the old design with the loader that was made of 3 orange dots.

> People can’t do anything without any information about why they’re blocked. Who do you contact? Where do you go? What to do?

This is the most serious problem with all of the major companies these days. Cloudflare, Google, Apple, etc. When you get on their "bad side", you're just screwed. You'll never even know what got them mad at you, and there's nothing you can do to recover.

The only reasonable way to deal with this is to avoid them all to the greatest extent possible. You have no control over whether or not you deal with Cloudflare, unfortunately, which makes them the worst of the lot.

> It’s okay if you only see it for two seconds. But the page stays on screen for over a minute.

That doesn't sound right. You shouldn't see a loading page for over a minute. If you're open to providing more details privately I'd love to help troubleshoot. You can drop me an email at amartinetti @ cloudflare.

What I do when I want a new IP is change my router's MAC address and reboot the modem.

I edited and added a second link to a support page that mentions it too.

Thanks. I'm talking with the team.

Edit: see comment above.