Indeed. He has previously mentioned that he set up an alerting system to notify him when Cloudflare is mentioned on HN, as well. So it's a mix of both.
His response here was perfectly adequate and beyond what the CTO of almost any other large tech company would ever do. Not that it deserves unbridled praise and admiration or something, but the immediate attacks and "weasel word" accusations from others are really weird. HN is way too cynical, sometimes.