alt Hacker NewsNo one here is being "cut off from the internet" during the blocks, you grossly misunderstand what's happening here.
If you're on a residential connection, during play of the matches, you can't access any of the Cloudflare IPs, but everything else keeps working as-is. Most businesses already migrated away from Cloudflare once these blocks started happening, so most of the affected people are the ones using services that rely on Cloudflare.
As mentioned elsewhere, don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I wish it went away, and I'll keep complaining to the ones I can about it, but "they're cut off from half the internet" isn't accurate unless somehow half the services you use happen to rely on Cloudflare (which, at least for me, isn't true, maybe 10% of what I use daily is affected by this).
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Blocking Cloudflare is not significantly different from cutting the internet depending on which part of it you need. We recently had a thread about CI jobs failing to connect to Docker from Spain during football. I personally know when there's football because saucenao stops working.
I can’t do a simple `docker pull postgres:18` every time there’s a football match on.
Ok, I'm sorry for the hyperbole of saying "half the internet" if it's in fact 10%. But come on, that's still massive.
It's not a stretch for small businesses to be reliant on residential connections either.
I once had a day (and made a Tell HN about that too) where I couldn't access 3 of the links from the HN start page (and I didn't try all of them) during a match, because of that football IP block. It might not be half the internet, but I definitely felt like living in a country with massive censorship. And to me - given that I totally do not understand how people find watching football interesting in any way - for the most incomprehensible reason.