Original <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-cloudflare-nearly-took-down-2m-festival-over-081-jack-vanstone-sii6e" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">article</a> from LinkedIn.
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Another day, another major issue at Cloudflare.
Cloudflare has developed a reputation for being unreliable. A pretty crazy state of play for a company which secures the lions share of internet traffic.
There are many problems with Cloudflare, whether it’s a careless infinite regress loop, poor UI design, major outages due to a lack of resilience and redundancy in their partner infrastructure, or their ironic inability to handle a thundering-herd inside their own systems.
Many people have fallen prey to Cloudflare’s nonsense and poor business and technical management in recent years. And today, at NaughtyDuk© we got the discreet displeasure of experiencing this ourselves, when Cloudflare took our client’s R2 buckets offline over $0.81, which had been overdue for just 4 days.
It’s worth noting that the original card is active and working with all other non-Cloudflare services it is connected to. Strange, but payment issues happen, this is a basic problem with a quick solution, or so you might think.
Login, add a new payment method, pay - right?
WRONG. This is Cloudflare, remember.
After clearing the egregious $0.81 balance on your client’s account with a new card, you would think that critical services would be restored immediately, your account is now in good standing, after all.
But Cloudflare is not like other businesses. Cloudflare does not care about their reputation.
Instead, less than 24 hours out from ticket sales for a major festival, their systems show 2 ominous and glaring issues for which there are no excuses.
It takes up to 24 hours for you to be able to access critical infrastructure
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--_sLT0O4z--/f_auto/v1769052225/ugc/content_d37f0cf3-0096-4764-947f-90bc068c1230?_a=BAMAMiiu0" alt="24hrs">
You still have an outstanding balance, despite payment clearing already
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--V045g9as--/f_auto/v1769052242/ugc/content_c4c57965-f069-48e9-80b8-3d979ae40c01?_a=BAMAMiiu0" alt="pastinv">
The payment page still loads with the ‘outstanding’ amount which has already been cleared.
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--sHzQpkJ---/f_auto/v1769052255/ugc/content_557488d5-c769-42d5-8041-196988299e92?_a=BAMAMiiu0" alt="incorrectbilling">
I often think, “man this is really bad, I’ve been doing this for” checks watch “decades now, and I’ve never seen such poor systems design”. It’s so rife, that this happens almost weekly at this point.
But honestly this one takes the cake.
I raised a P1, 2 hours ago, still no response.
And whilst I have said ‘nearly’ took down, it’s only because I monitor our client’s infrastructure like a hawk that this was noticed before my client did. Otherwise their primary site would be down a day before thousands of people are due to buy tickets, with core functionality not only broken, but completely inaccessible.
All over $0.81 which was 4 days overdue.
It’s still not clear why the original payment method failed, as the card was in active use with other services and fully funded whilst it was failing with Cloudflare.
Congratulations Matthew Prince and Dane Knecht on another day of terrible software development and infrastructure decisions that even a 5 year old could tell you are a bad idea. You have a responsibility to your customers, perhaps one day you will live up to it.
In the meantime, you need to review your billing-to-live processes, 24 hours for reactivation of critical services is unacceptable, not only because of your presence in the industry, but because even AI chatbot wrappers immediately reinstate full permissions and account access.
What’s your excuse?
Sorry, what’s your excuse this time?

Jack

A festival website nearly went offline when Cloudflare suspended R2 bucket access over an $0.81 overdue payment that was only 4 days late. After paying the balance with a new card, the account showed conflicting billing states and required up to 24 hours for service restoration, threatening ticket sales scheduled for the next day. The incident highlights concerns about Cloudflare's billing-to-live processes, account reactivation delays, and the disproportionate impact of automated payment enforcement on critical infrastructure.

How Cloudflare nearly took down a $2M festival over $0.81 that had already been paid