I'm not sure why you're surprised.<p>CloudFlare is amateur at best, compared to existing DSA/CDN offerings from Akamai, Cotendo, EdgeCast etc.<p>But those cost a lot of money (at <i>least</i> 50-100x the cost of CloudFlare) if you're small/medium sized. You get what you pay for with $20/month.<p>The 3 second slow down looks like a standard TCP reset + retry. They're probably having issues with that particular POP. That it took several hours/days for the 'best engineering team in the world' to resolve tells you all you need to know about the service level you should expect from them.<p>But, once again, it's $20/month.