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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

This is known as 'inserting yourself in the news story' and it works well as a marketing trick but in this case cloudflare is actually part of the story because the NYT (one of the affected sites) and cloudflare did communicate on the subject. The more peripheral the link the trickier it is, in this case (a first order contact with the affected party which was initiated by cloudflare) I think it is fine to issue some statement, but not necessarily this statement.

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Not only did CloudFlare (where I work) and the New York Times communicate, the CTO of the paper has said the following: https://twitter.com/rajivpant/status/372559771960098816

"I'm super impressed by the operations, incident/crisis management & expertise of the @CloudFlare and @OpenDNS teams."

Since it isn't obvious from your profile or the comment maybe add a bit that you're working for cloudflare?

edit: thanks John.

Before leaving my comment, I searched and searched for any shred of reason for CloudFlare to release this inappropriate statement, including reading all of Rajiv's timeline. Obviously, since I left the comment, I came up empty.

Can you point to what you feel makes this statement appropriate on behalf of your company? I can't identify what annoys me most about it, because there are many things: the "it's who you know in ops" attitude that I've been fighting for my entire career, the creation of a Batman-esque hero at a startup CDN provider who assembles a team to guide the lesser ops teams through a crisis, the overdramatizing of a DNS hijack that happens countless times daily (just with an interesting vector this time, but certainly not the first of ITS kind, either), speculating on another company's statements, preempting an official response with your own "postmortem" to score some traffic...

It's particularly frustrating because I've been in this exact scenario, to the T and including a registrar compromise, before. But because my personal side project doesn't have name pull, I didn't get a CloudFlare Crack Squad on speakerphone calling in a dozen courtesy phone favors to score my contract. And I had to wait for tickets and TTLs like everyone else. That sounds bitter -- and I hate bringing it up for that reason -- but that's why this is ethically shitty. Either you're playing favorites or capitalizing on something for sales. There is no third option, not even an altruistic one.

No good deed, it seems, goes unpunished by those upset they're not getting enough attention. May I suggest you read the end of the NYT CTO's recently updated blog post:

http://www.rajiv.com/blog/2009/12/10/tech-ops-irc/#2013Aug28

That wasn't remotely the thrust of my comments and you know it. I also (correctly) predicted you would hop on the bitter swan song instead of, you know, the half-dozen reasons why this sucks immediately prefacing it. Also, that's two employees who have posted Rajiv's words as rationale for the blog post; can we go for three? Shouldn't you be hiring Rajiv at this point, as hard as you're riding him?

Address something smaller and bite-sized, like preempting MelbourneIT's statement with your own and speculating on their behalf. Can you at least defend that inappropriateness? Can we start there?

Your company provided guidance and connections, which makes this statement inappropriate. Or did CloudFlare do something that has been left out of all statements?

I am not annoyed by your "good deed". I'm annoyed by how hard and how inappropriately you are capitalizing upon it as a PR coup, before the ashes have even settled. The victim tone is discouraging for this conversation, I have to say, and it's quite unbecoming.

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