May 11, 2026
Cloudflare and the Fury
Can Someone Please Explain Whether Cloudflare Blackmailed Canonical?
Ubuntu outage sparks "blackmail" freakout as commenters yell: that's not how any of this works
TLDR: Canonical’s Ubuntu sites were knocked offline for nearly 20 hours, while the attack service blamed for it appeared to remain protected by the same company Canonical uses. That triggered a fierce comment war, with some calling it scandalous and others insisting the “blackmail” claim is flat-out wrong.
The internet had a full-on main character meltdown over Ubuntu maker Canonical getting knocked offline for about 20 hours — and the biggest gasp wasn’t just the outage. It was the eyebrow-raising detail that the attack service bragged about getting around Cloudflare while also sitting behind Cloudflare’s own protection. That led to the juiciest accusation of all: is this basically a protection racket with extra steps? One commenter even dropped a Hacker News thread asking why Cloudflare was “protecting the DDoS’er,” and you could practically hear keyboards being slammed across the internet.
But the comments quickly turned into a pedantry cage match. One camp went full outrage, treating the setup like a villain origin story for modern internet infrastructure: attackers get cover, victims pay for relief, everyone else gets a front-row seat. The other camp was having absolutely none of it. “They didn’t,” snapped one reply, while others called the blackmail claim “insanely dumb” and insisted Cloudflare was not directly helping the attack, just failing to boot bad actors fast enough. Then came the legal-word nerds, because of course they did: one commenter popped in to correct everyone that if anything, it would be extortion, not blackmail.
So yes, the facts are serious — a major Linux vendor went dark, and the attack service stayed online afterward — but the comments became the real spectacle: part ethics debate, part monopoly rant, part “well actually” Olympics. Peak internet.
Key Points
- •Canonical’s public web properties, including blog.ubuntu.com and ubuntu.com, were reported down on 30 April 2026, with restoration on 1 May 2026 after roughly 20 hours.
- •The article says the group claiming responsibility named Beamed, a paid denial-of-service service, as a tool it rented for the attack.
- •An April 2026 Beamed blog post advertised techniques for bypassing Cloudflare protections, including residential IP rotation and endpoint hunting.
- •The article states that both Beamed domains and Canonical repository endpoints resolved to Cloudflare AS13335 addresses.
- •The article traces Beamed’s domain registration to UK-registered registrar Immaterialism Limited and names former and current directors from Companies House records.