Even when I just had 2 paid domains with Cloudflare, there was real time chat support that seemed to always have an available engineer when something came up.
Maybe they don't provide support like that to free users.
For something as core as DNS, I'm sure engineers were aware about the issue within minutes. There's a lot of politics and processes between that and public acknowledgment of an incident.
What I want as an engineer is an engineering contact (similar to a NOC) that "normal customers" aren't aware of.
Something as critical as DNS should have that - but maybe I expect too much from a free service.
cloud: you are the product, not the customer
I get the "you're the product, not the customer" for social networks or ad-based search engines, but certainly not for cloud products.
I got on particular fix one time in just a few minutes, and scalated pretty quickly. I got a recomendation fix on my side (a code change on my deployment that cover the problem) and a permanent fix on CF side 4h latter (time that took to changes propagate to all colos)
7:57 UTC: first reports coming in
I noticed this issue quite quickly ("reported" at 7:54 UTC [1]), and I noticed I wasn't alone thanks to Twitter / X. I tried to get in touch with Cloudflare to report this issue - but I haven't found any meaningful contact other than Twitter.
For such an important service, I'm impressed there is no contact email / form where you can get in touch with the engineers responsible for keeping the service up and running.
Other than that, kudos for the well written blog post - as always!
[1]: https://nitter.net/DenysVitali/status/1709476961523835246