alt Hacker NewsYeah, their origin is a story of absolute incredible luck. Cloudflare came out of nowhere and suddenly massive sites with huge user bases around the world, including places like 4chan, were getting DDoSed. Then they immediately announce that they transitioned to Cloudflare. Hell of a lucky time to make a company that the entire internet suddenly became absolutely dependent on.
The funny thing about that era is you knew they started using Cloudflare because they went from stable with constant uptime to going down and showing a Cloudflare banner randomly all the time for a good year or so. They ran worse with Cloudflare than they did while they were allegedly getting DDoSed. The whole company glows, as the late great HN commenter Terry Davis would've said.
Am i the only one that actually remembers this time period? It wasn’t that long ago. The confidence of your assertion is completely misplaced. I remember exactly where i was when I first read about CF, on launch day. DDoS attacks were CERTAINLY a big issue before Cloudflare came along. A whole lot of script kiddie energy was poured into them. LHC? Slowloris? IRC C2? This wasn’t niche stuff. That’s why I remember the CF launch, because I and everyone else knew that it was a big deal, given what the landscape had been for quite some time. Sorry if you personally didn’t have your finger on the pulse for whatever reason, but this was far from a niche issue, even for big sites / usual targets like 4chan.