My former Cloudflare TAM reached out to me this afternoon. I had already terminated all of my services, but they wanted to follow up with me (primarily to cover their own ass to make sure they weren’t the reason services were terminated).
Long story short, when asked why I terminated my services, I was very vague in mentioning an article I stumbled across on a completely adjacent website which linked to the blog post that Prince wrote. The TAM hadn’t seen the blog post yet. They skimmed over it on the phone and their reaction, more or less, was “… oh. That’s not good.” Small FYI, a credible threat of violence isn’t handled outwardly like this. There would not have been a splash page or a blog post that supported it. Law enforcement, etc. would have worked directly with Null and other involved parties to gather information without flagrantly interrupting ALL services. This was a performance piece.
I let the TAM know that I was uncomfortable with this emotional response to outright “block” a website. The rest of the conversation was the typical lip service that you’d expect from support staff, however, the TAM did mention that the social media/marketing team has been handling an “ongoing issue of some sort” recently and that they were stressed out.
In all sincerity, this might seem like a “comfy W” to some, but it really sets a dangerous precedent. If given enough effort, you can eek out an emotional, knee-jerk response from a service provider to have them bending to your will. This isn’t just. If it can happen to us, it can happen to you.