I mean I'm not familiar with every debt collection scenario under the sun but Internet randos seem to think this is a real thing where like a cloud/hosting company sends an army of lawyers to repo some guy's house and runs him into bankruptcy because of a traffic overage. I've never seen it work that way, what happens like with most business debts, is someone at the company negotiates with the debtor to try and get as much out of them as they can, and failing that, possibly refers it to a collections agency which does the same but plays a bit more hardball.
In the case here with Netlify even before it went viral they reduced the amount from $104K to $5K, no lawyers, collectors or repo men involved, and while I'd hate to be stuck with that $5K bill, I dunno, that does feel closer to the mark of something that maybe you should be on the hook for if you're responsible for 200 TB of bandwidth overage over 4 days? Is this so bad on the part of Netlify?
All that said I'll just add that I've never given my credit card to any sort of host/cloud who had terms where they could bill unlimited overage fees like this. Never will unless there's a cap. Not Netlify not AWS not nobody. That goes for my personal life as well as for the business I operate. The terms is the terms and the answer is to not use these services unless you can afford them imho.
The responsibility part is the tricky part of the equation.
If someone hits your site with a DDoS attack, are you responsible? There's literally nothing[0] you can do as a customer of a cloud provider here because anything you can do is limited to the servers and services you're given access to. For example even if I had access to billions of requests and built an anti-DDoS tool it would still need to run within the cloud provider's provisioned server which means I'd be on the hook for all traffic costs because it's something running in my account.
That doesn't seem reasonable to me as a customer. It means a cloud hosting provider can put an extreme financial burden on a customer and make a killing in profits because of the markup they charge on bandwidth. The incentives are terribly misaligned.
[0]: I mean you can sign up for DDoS protection through a 3rd party company but in this case I'm talking about taking actions within your hosting provider.
From personal experience as a customer of a cloud provider (not with Netlify btw), usually cloud providers who profit from bandwidth costs will write their TOS in such a way where almost nothing qualifies as a DDoS attack unless it's truly a distributed and targeted large scale attack specifically on your site.
A random person on the internet who spins up a few VPSs around the world and slams your site with looped curl requests won't count as a DDoS attack even though from your perspective that will result in a massive bill increase due to bandwidth costs.
In other words, I'm not surprised "didn't match attack patterns" was used. I'm guessing that will be the case most of the time.
Mostly false. Either transit is billed on a 95th%ile basis (so...more money for more traffic), or if it is flat/netted, you're still paying for the capex for the switch ports (fatter connection to support more traffic means more $$$ for the gear to support it).
You can say "the sum total of free-tier traffic requires X additional connections" but the sudden burst of DoS traffic did not raise marginal costs (besides an inconsequential usage of electricity).
There would be many attorneys interested in collecting a $105k debt.