this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 237 points 9 months ago (7 children)

Before everyone gets their pitchforks out - Person from the image posted on Hacker News, CEO replied and said this charge shouldn't have happened and they wouldn't be charging the client anything.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39520776

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 137 points 9 months ago

Phew, good to know that if this ever happens to me as a customer, I just need to go viral on HN. What a relief.

[–] ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com 100 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah that's is an attack on Netlify and not on him. It's them that should have protections against this. I argue that the customer can't even effectively defend against this themselves if they're using Netlify, which is turn means a court would likely get them off the hook for anything that can easily be classified as a DDOS attack.

[–] Zworf@beehaw.org 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Hm yes and no. The user might have angered someone with their website and it might well have been targeted to them instead of Netlify as a whole? I can imagine them using that point in a court if that was the case.

If I were to host on such a service I'd probably put cloudflare in front. Especially as it seems to be static content. But I wouldn't host on a service with unlimited pricing anyway. I'd much rather see my hobby site go down than to have world-class uptime and pay 100k :P

[–] moody@lemmings.world 24 points 9 months ago (1 children)

But how do you go from 10GB monthly to 190TB without it raising any flags? Apparently their site had been up for 4 years and suddenly the usage spikes by nearly 2 million percent, and nobody thinks to check up on why, or to notify the user that they're using an extreme amount of data, way beyond what they usually do.

[–] aStonedSanta@lemm.ee 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You’d think a competent company would have bots to scour this data and raise alarms, yet here we are.

[–] echodot 3 points 8 months ago

Hell even AWS isn't this bad. You can go in and set the maximum data you're prepared to allow and then it'll simply just block any connection attempt after that point and send you an alert.

You just have to be aware that you might need to keep an eye on things and be ready to increase bandwidth occasionally in case of something like Black Friday, assuming that kind of thing is relevant to your site.

[–] echodot 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The user might have angered someone with their website and it might well have been targeted to them instead of Netlify as a whole? I can imagine them using that point in a court if that was the case.

They wouldn't really get anywhere with that claim though, even if it were true and they could find evidence, because the company claims that they actively scan for and protect against this sort of thing, and even they admit that it was a DDoS attack.

[–] Zworf@beehaw.org 76 points 9 months ago

Good to hear but it sounds like if the person hadn't gathered so much traction on HN they might still have been screwed.

[–] moroni@lemmy.ca 66 points 9 months ago (1 children)

CEO said that forgiving bills for this kind of a thing is a standard practice, but how come this was the customer support's first reaction:

We normally discount these kinds of attacks to about 20% of the cost, which would make your new bill $20,900. I've currently reduced it to about 5%, which is $5,225.

If the customer support has authority to give 20%/5% discounts, this seems to me like the standard practice, and the CEO is probably just doing damage control because this became public.

[–] BurningRiver@beehaw.org 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

In this case, customer service is giving roughly 80% / 95% discounts. Which I think bolsters your point even further.

[–] echodot 3 points 8 months ago

When I worked in customer service I think the largest i was ever able to issue was a 10% discount. Even with managerial approval I don't think I ever saw anyone get more than a 25% discount, and that was for legitimate complaints, not the Karen style made up whining.

[–] nieceandtows@programming.dev 10 points 9 months ago

Good to know, thanks for the info.

[–] TheaoneAndOnly27@kbin.social 3 points 9 months ago

Awesome, thank you for the update.