I doubt you're getting downvoted for that. I suspect you're getting downvoted for your comment having nothing to do with the partial outage. And then going on to argue that you're doing the right thing by posting here and spending effort commenting about your comment rather than telling someone at Cloudflare that you spotted something bad.

I did tell someone, the problem persisted for months after. I told the guy that sits next to the lava lamps.

OK. You've edited your comment to say you told the night guard. Sorry that they didn't communicate this to someone. I've now spoken to the San Francisco office team despite the late hour and it'll be addressed.

You’re free to start a Tell HN or write a blog post and post the link here for people to discuss. But hijacking of unrelated threads is not welcome on HN. Check guidelines.

Thank you, I understand, I will not do so in the future.

Either of these courses of action seem like even more of a public shame, which was not my intent.

It might be “software theft” but it could be a simple mistake with the license, which can happen if you reinstall or change hardware or something like that, and they need MS support to fix it.