TL;DR: We've been on the Cloudflare Business plan ($250/month) for years. They suddenly contacted us and asked us to either pay them $120k up front for one year of Enterprise within 24 hours or they would take down all of our domains. While this escalated up our business we had 3 sales calls with them, trying to figure out what was happening and how to reach a reasonable contract in a week. When we told them we were also in talks with Fastly, they suddenly "purged" all our domains, causing huge downtime in our core business, sleepless nights migrating away from CF, irreparable loss in customer trust and weeks of ongoing downtime in our internal systems.
I don’t think that was the case.
The substack post is a one-sided and very partial account, and one that doesn’t pass the smell test. They use an awful lot of weasel worlds and leave about whole accounts on what has been discussed with cloud flare in meetings summoned with a matter of urgency.
Occam’s razor suggests they were intentionally involved in multiple layers of abuse, were told to stop it, ignored all warnings, and once the consequences hit they decided to launch a public attack on their hosting providers.