9 ms·

Mozilla site down due to "overdue hosting payments" [fixed]

161 points by motownphilly 2y ago

CaliforniaKarl 2y ago
discourse.mozilla.org is an alias for mozilla.hosted-by-discourse.com.
StressedDev 2y ago
I suspect the moral of the story is devops and operations staff need to keep all payments, secret rotations, certificate expirations, etc. on a calendar so no one forgets to pay the bills. I hope the employee who forgot to pay the bill learns from this.
- bobbymcgee33 2y ago
  [dead]
- dijit 2y ago
  Ops is an interesting domain, nobody knows what they do until they don't do it; so everyone wants the jobs to disappear, and when they do it's fun what happens. I'm beyond certain that someone will reply "use a cloud provider", which is ironic, as cloud providers just concentrate these kinds of ops people and charge you through the nose (often an order of magnitude more in my experience) than having people responsible. Unpopular opinion, probably, because people seem to like dehumanising operations issues on this site- sure, things can be automated, but at some point there's got to be some responsibility.
  - vednig 2y ago
    ^This is the most sensible understanding of the space, in my opinion
  - testrun 2y ago
    I agree, ops is like a toilet. Nobody cares, until it does not work.
  - vasco 2y ago
    If a technical person is even close to involved with paying for a SaaS Discourse forum hosting something is extremely wrong. This is part of business operations or finance. This is already a "cloud provider". It's the same as paying for Google Workspace or an HR platform.
- Rexxar 2y ago
  I would expect more professional operations considering the very high salaries of Mozilla foundation management and I would not blame any particular employee for this problem.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
  You do know most companies in the world have a department specifically for handling financial matters, right? (Hint: it's not the IT department) Also, I don't know if you're aware of this, but technology has advanced sufficiently that nobody needs to manually pay a monthly bill anymore. I know it sounds crazy, but there's these things called "bill pay", and "recurring credit card changes", that have existed for 20ish years now. Might want to read up on the latest trends!
- PeterStuer 2y ago
  More likely no-one "forgot" to pay. Typically administration optimizes payments. Getting a large corp to pay a small contractor or service provider at all let alone on time can prove to be a nightmare.
neilv 2y ago
> This site is in read-only mode because there are overdue hosting payments. Coinciding with techie social media outrage over the TOU fiasco, and repeatedly mishandled by corporate, so now the read-only mode means the outrage can't spread to Mozilla forums, where it might reach a wider audience?
neilv 2y ago
Why is a SaaS locking out a fairly high-profile customer like this, and publicly airing B2B accounts-receivable drama, to the customer's community? How big can the bill be, for something you could run on a 20 year-old PC? Given the strange coincidence with the social media outrage over TOU fiasco, I don't know who to be scratching my puzzled head at here.
- benjojo12 2y ago
  It's a pretty good way to get the bill paid to be honest I also run a B2B SaaS and I have found that over time the customers who I think are going to be terrible for paying, typically tend to be very good at paying and the customers who I think are going to be very good for paying (in that they have good standing in the community in things like that) tend to be pretty bad at paying on time (and with NET30 and all) Ultimately I don't really understand why I shouldn't be paid on time (I've got to live too, and I have suppliers likewise) so I think this is pretty fair game, I sold you a product under the promise that you would pay in 30 days, if you're incapable of doing that (ignoring exceptional reasons) I don't necessarily want to go and lend you extra credit just because you're Mozilla Having a terrible accounts receivable department isn't a exceptional reason.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 2y ago
    Because if you don’t, they might go somewhere else.
    - xigoi 2y ago
      Losing a non-paying customer does not sound like a bad thing.
      - magicalhippo 2y ago
        If it's the first time in 10 years and they're in your upper tier, then perhaps it is.
  - neilv 2y ago
johnklos 2y ago
Organization with hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue and spend can't maintain servers? I would wonder if this is really something much simpler: an excuse to make things read-only, while implying that people really should give them money if they want things to work. Really, I can't lose any more respect for Mozilla at this point. It's all gone.
- Jolter 2y ago
  If you have ever done subcontracting work or been a supplier to a major automotive corps, you’ll know the can be extremely late to pay at times. They use their muscle to get a free line of credit from their suppliers by simply demanding to get an extra 30 days on their deadline every month. Not saying this is Mozilla’s policy, just pointing out it may be an accident or it may be a lack of funds, or something entirely different.
  - tempodox 2y ago
    I believe in coincidences. Coincidences happen every day. In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected. But I do not trust coincidences.
  - suslik 2y ago
    I’ve done things similar to this as a purchasing manager (in a different industry). Providers sometimes required a payment schedule that was critical to their cashflow (and I did feel very sympathetic), but I had to pressure them into a very unfavorable schedule - otherwise the contract would never be approved by finance. Small companies sometimes had hard time understanding that there were rules I simply couldn’t bend, and it was rather unpleasant at times. However, that was always sorted out during negotiations.
  - NitpickLawyer 2y ago
    > supplier to a major automotive corps, you’ll know the can be extremely late to pay at times. I'll add telcos to this list. Absolutely the worst customers to have. Net90 paid on time was a good thing.
- 2y ago
chaoskitty 2y ago
This doesn't feel like an oversight or an accident. It'll be interesting to see how they try to explain this away.
- nom 2y ago
  Why? Are you getting bad vibes or something? It is way more likely to be an oversight.
- HackerThemAll 2y ago
  Look for comments from "sylvestre".
ivan_gammel 2y ago
It makes sense to correct the title. Currently it says „Mozilla site down…“ but it is not the front page and not „down“, so most people using Mozilla products are not affected. Better version would be „One of Mozilla sites is in read-only mode…“
35mm 2y ago
[flagged]
- nindalf 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - DonHopkins 2y ago
    [flagged]
- petesergeant 2y ago
  File this under things the government could fix pretty easily, and would make the economy run better, while being unpopular with a tiny fraction of voters.
  - FredPret 2y ago
    “Pretty easily” Sure, how hard can it be to police the payment terms on every one of the likely billions of invoices out there and drag non-payers to court. Such a system will totally not get abused with bogus invoices either.
    - petesergeant 2y ago
      > Sure, how hard can it be to police the payment terms on every one of the likely billions of invoices out there and drag non-payers to court. Set a mandate for companies over a certain revenue size to maintain records, and self-report. Do spot-checks and fine a percentage of revenue. You understand the government already performs audits, right? > [bogus invoices will be a problem] A worse problem than they already are for large accounts receivable departments? Why?
      - FredPret 2y ago
        Much better to work within the confines of the existing legal structure, which has been hammered out over millennia and takes into account myriad edge cases and overlapping rights and concerns. Word-of-mouth, the small claims court, and careful cashflow management is sufficient for a small company doing business with large ones. What you're describing is an EU-style behemoth of a government, which isn't even popular in Europe.
josteink 2y ago
As reported by parts of the tech press this last year, Mozilla is seemingly on its way to certain bankruptcy. I guess we should expect more incidents like this the time to come.
- Figs 2y ago
  > Mozilla is seemingly on its way to certain bankruptcy. Mozilla has hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and over a billion in investments according to their last financial statement -- so, no, they are not.
  - josteink 2y ago
    It doesn’t matter much what they have in cash and non-liquid assets if they don’t have a balanced budget. 90% of Mozilla’s direct income (cash) comes from Google. And it looks like that funding may go away soon [1]. If Firefox had a big marketshare they might be able to capitalise on that, but right now it’s the lowest it’s ever been, and they keep on burning bridges. [1] https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/why-googles-legal-troubles-could-hasten-firefoxs-slide-into-irrelevance/ https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/why-googles...
- HackerThemAll 2y ago
  More of you switch to data-harvesting Chromium derivatives and scams, and we'll have no true alternative browser, the only one that is Manifest V2 compatible.
  - josteink 2y ago
    > the only one that is Manifest V2 compatible Could you provide a reason why that is a feature? All the extensions I’ve implemented runs fine as V3 manifests, and they allow much more fine-grained security permissions. That’s something I’m happy with, even as a developer. It limits the security impact of whatever flaws my extension may have.
    - 2y ago
sylvestre 2y ago
Please don't read too much into this ;) We moved from self-hosted Discourse to hosted Discourse. The transfer was initiated late from the Mozilla side (my bad) and the automatic system from Discourse kicked in.
- pinoy420 2y ago
  [dead]
- issafram 2y ago
  You work for Mozilla?
  - sylvestre 2y ago
    Yes
    - Aleklart 2y ago
      Please tell guys who is responsible for js engine to fix handling of large cookies that google is using to slow down youtube on firefox. It is impossible to watch youtube logged in because of that. God bless you sir.
      - pipe2devnull 2y ago
        I really only use Firefox and I’ve never had an issue with YouTube logged in and I use it a lot.
      - nolok 2y ago
        What's the bugzilla number / link ?
      - sdk- 2y ago
        WFM. You might want to either ask help on support.mozilla.org or file a bug on bugzilla.mozilla.org if you have a step to reproduce.
      - 2y ago
throwaway150 2y ago
The title should be: "Mozilla's Discourse forum is in read-only mode due to overdue hosting payments" The current title gives the false impression that mozilla.org is down.
jisnsm 2y ago
Very unprofessional of Discourse to publicly shame a client like this. If they are not being paid and they care so much about the cost they should bring the website down instead of resorting to petty shaming.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- drpossum 2y ago
  I think we should have more public shaming of companies' negligence. If you don't pay your bills you're publicly shamed in your credit score. Also consider that those types of things happen after several rounds of ignored warnings.
bolognafairy 2y ago
The comments here are hilarious. So many people getting on their soapbox about someone forgetting to pay a bill. Something that has undoubtedly happened at your organisation, and happens at most, given enough time. This website fucking sucks.
- greenchair 2y ago
  yep so much manufactured outrage and fake drama on several stories today.
ajb 2y ago
Given that the discussion has moved to late payments generally, a question for freelancers and others who are subject to this: Would you be up for a service which allowed you to automatically share intelligence on which companies are late payers? Benefits would potentially be: - Find out in advance how late your will be paid - Early warning of creditors doing aggressive cash management (aka going bust) The idea would be that it would be funded by selling information about payers (not payees) eg, to insurance companies. NB the obvious way to implement this is to get access to bank transactions, which I know requires a lot of trust. But maybe with eg the Open Banking API, there's some way to do it such that you can trust that only the right information is shared.
p3rls 2y ago
Happens to the best of us
tatersolid 2y ago
I learned the hard way (major outage) back in the 1990s that no accounts payable or accounts receivable should ever be tied to a single person’s email address. You should use a shared mailbox account like ap@example.com when signing up for all services, or supply that as a separate billing address if the vendor allows. Then you make sure there are always at least three employees monitoring that mailbox, even as people come and go.

161 points by motownphilly 2y ago

discourse.mozilla.org is an alias for mozilla.hosted-by-discourse.com.

I suspect the moral of the story is devops and operations staff need to keep all payments, secret rotations, certificate expirations, etc. on a calendar so no one forgets to pay the bills. I hope the employee who forgot to pay the bill learns from this.

bobbymcgee33 2y ago
[dead]
dijit 2y ago
Ops is an interesting domain, nobody knows what they do until they don't do it; so everyone wants the jobs to disappear, and when they do it's fun what happens. I'm beyond certain that someone will reply "use a cloud provider", which is ironic, as cloud providers just concentrate these kinds of ops people and charge you through the nose (often an order of magnitude more in my experience) than having people responsible. Unpopular opinion, probably, because people seem to like dehumanising operations issues on this site- sure, things can be automated, but at some point there's got to be some responsibility.
- vednig 2y ago
  ^This is the most sensible understanding of the space, in my opinion
- testrun 2y ago
  I agree, ops is like a toilet. Nobody cares, until it does not work.
- vasco 2y ago
  If a technical person is even close to involved with paying for a SaaS Discourse forum hosting something is extremely wrong. This is part of business operations or finance. This is already a "cloud provider". It's the same as paying for Google Workspace or an HR platform.
Rexxar 2y ago
I would expect more professional operations considering the very high salaries of Mozilla foundation management and I would not blame any particular employee for this problem.
0xbadcafebee 2y ago
You do know most companies in the world have a department specifically for handling financial matters, right? (Hint: it's not the IT department) Also, I don't know if you're aware of this, but technology has advanced sufficiently that nobody needs to manually pay a monthly bill anymore. I know it sounds crazy, but there's these things called "bill pay", and "recurring credit card changes", that have existed for 20ish years now. Might want to read up on the latest trends!
PeterStuer 2y ago
More likely no-one "forgot" to pay. Typically administration optimizes payments. Getting a large corp to pay a small contractor or service provider at all let alone on time can prove to be a nightmare.

neilv 2y ago

> This site is in read-only mode because there are overdue hosting payments. Coinciding with techie social media outrage over the TOU fiasco, and repeatedly mishandled by corporate, so now the read-only mode means the outrage can't spread to Mozilla forums, where it might reach a wider audience?

neilv 2y ago

Why is a SaaS locking out a fairly high-profile customer like this, and publicly airing B2B accounts-receivable drama, to the customer's community? How big can the bill be, for something you could run on a 20 year-old PC? Given the strange coincidence with the social media outrage over TOU fiasco, I don't know who to be scratching my puzzled head at here.

benjojo12 2y ago
It's a pretty good way to get the bill paid to be honest I also run a B2B SaaS and I have found that over time the customers who I think are going to be terrible for paying, typically tend to be very good at paying and the customers who I think are going to be very good for paying (in that they have good standing in the community in things like that) tend to be pretty bad at paying on time (and with NET30 and all) Ultimately I don't really understand why I shouldn't be paid on time (I've got to live too, and I have suppliers likewise) so I think this is pretty fair game, I sold you a product under the promise that you would pay in 30 days, if you're incapable of doing that (ignoring exceptional reasons) I don't necessarily want to go and lend you extra credit just because you're Mozilla Having a terrible accounts receivable department isn't a exceptional reason.
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y ago
  Because if you don’t, they might go somewhere else.
  - xigoi 2y ago
    Losing a non-paying customer does not sound like a bad thing.
    - magicalhippo 2y ago
      If it's the first time in 10 years and they're in your upper tier, then perhaps it is.
- neilv 2y ago

johnklos 2y ago

Organization with hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue and spend can't maintain servers? I would wonder if this is really something much simpler: an excuse to make things read-only, while implying that people really should give them money if they want things to work. Really, I can't lose any more respect for Mozilla at this point. It's all gone.

Jolter 2y ago
If you have ever done subcontracting work or been a supplier to a major automotive corps, you’ll know the can be extremely late to pay at times. They use their muscle to get a free line of credit from their suppliers by simply demanding to get an extra 30 days on their deadline every month. Not saying this is Mozilla’s policy, just pointing out it may be an accident or it may be a lack of funds, or something entirely different.
- tempodox 2y ago
  I believe in coincidences. Coincidences happen every day. In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected. But I do not trust coincidences.
- suslik 2y ago
  I’ve done things similar to this as a purchasing manager (in a different industry). Providers sometimes required a payment schedule that was critical to their cashflow (and I did feel very sympathetic), but I had to pressure them into a very unfavorable schedule - otherwise the contract would never be approved by finance. Small companies sometimes had hard time understanding that there were rules I simply couldn’t bend, and it was rather unpleasant at times. However, that was always sorted out during negotiations.
- NitpickLawyer 2y ago
  > supplier to a major automotive corps, you’ll know the can be extremely late to pay at times. I'll add telcos to this list. Absolutely the worst customers to have. Net90 paid on time was a good thing.
2y ago

chaoskitty 2y ago

This doesn't feel like an oversight or an accident. It'll be interesting to see how they try to explain this away.

nom 2y ago
Why? Are you getting bad vibes or something? It is way more likely to be an oversight.
HackerThemAll 2y ago
Look for comments from "sylvestre".

ivan_gammel 2y ago

It makes sense to correct the title. Currently it says „Mozilla site down…“ but it is not the front page and not „down“, so most people using Mozilla products are not affected. Better version would be „One of Mozilla sites is in read-only mode…“

35mm 2y ago

[flagged]

nindalf 2y ago
[flagged]
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  [flagged]
petesergeant 2y ago
File this under things the government could fix pretty easily, and would make the economy run better, while being unpopular with a tiny fraction of voters.
- FredPret 2y ago
  “Pretty easily” Sure, how hard can it be to police the payment terms on every one of the likely billions of invoices out there and drag non-payers to court. Such a system will totally not get abused with bogus invoices either.
  - petesergeant 2y ago
    > Sure, how hard can it be to police the payment terms on every one of the likely billions of invoices out there and drag non-payers to court. Set a mandate for companies over a certain revenue size to maintain records, and self-report. Do spot-checks and fine a percentage of revenue. You understand the government already performs audits, right? > [bogus invoices will be a problem] A worse problem than they already are for large accounts receivable departments? Why?
    - FredPret 2y ago
      Much better to work within the confines of the existing legal structure, which has been hammered out over millennia and takes into account myriad edge cases and overlapping rights and concerns. Word-of-mouth, the small claims court, and careful cashflow management is sufficient for a small company doing business with large ones. What you're describing is an EU-style behemoth of a government, which isn't even popular in Europe.

josteink 2y ago

As reported by parts of the tech press this last year, Mozilla is seemingly on its way to certain bankruptcy. I guess we should expect more incidents like this the time to come.

Figs 2y ago
> Mozilla is seemingly on its way to certain bankruptcy. Mozilla has hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and over a billion in investments according to their last financial statement -- so, no, they are not.
- josteink 2y ago
  It doesn’t matter much what they have in cash and non-liquid assets if they don’t have a balanced budget. 90% of Mozilla’s direct income (cash) comes from Google. And it looks like that funding may go away soon [1]. If Firefox had a big marketshare they might be able to capitalise on that, but right now it’s the lowest it’s ever been, and they keep on burning bridges. [1] https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/why-googles-legal-troubles-could-hasten-firefoxs-slide-into-irrelevance/ https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/why-googles...
HackerThemAll 2y ago
More of you switch to data-harvesting Chromium derivatives and scams, and we'll have no true alternative browser, the only one that is Manifest V2 compatible.
- josteink 2y ago
  > the only one that is Manifest V2 compatible Could you provide a reason why that is a feature? All the extensions I’ve implemented runs fine as V3 manifests, and they allow much more fine-grained security permissions. That’s something I’m happy with, even as a developer. It limits the security impact of whatever flaws my extension may have.
  - 2y ago

sylvestre 2y ago

Please don't read too much into this ;) We moved from self-hosted Discourse to hosted Discourse. The transfer was initiated late from the Mozilla side (my bad) and the automatic system from Discourse kicked in.

pinoy420 2y ago
[dead]
issafram 2y ago
You work for Mozilla?
- sylvestre 2y ago
  Yes
  - Aleklart 2y ago
    Please tell guys who is responsible for js engine to fix handling of large cookies that google is using to slow down youtube on firefox. It is impossible to watch youtube logged in because of that. God bless you sir.
    - pipe2devnull 2y ago
      I really only use Firefox and I’ve never had an issue with YouTube logged in and I use it a lot.
    - nolok 2y ago
      What's the bugzilla number / link ?
    - sdk- 2y ago
      WFM. You might want to either ask help on support.mozilla.org or file a bug on bugzilla.mozilla.org if you have a step to reproduce.
    - 2y ago

throwaway150 2y ago

The title should be: "Mozilla's Discourse forum is in read-only mode due to overdue hosting payments" The current title gives the false impression that mozilla.org is down.

jisnsm 2y ago

Very unprofessional of Discourse to publicly shame a client like this. If they are not being paid and they care so much about the cost they should bring the website down instead of resorting to petty shaming.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
drpossum 2y ago
I think we should have more public shaming of companies' negligence. If you don't pay your bills you're publicly shamed in your credit score. Also consider that those types of things happen after several rounds of ignored warnings.

bolognafairy 2y ago

The comments here are hilarious. So many people getting on their soapbox about someone forgetting to pay a bill. Something that has undoubtedly happened at your organisation, and happens at most, given enough time. This website fucking sucks.

greenchair 2y ago
yep so much manufactured outrage and fake drama on several stories today.

ajb 2y ago

Given that the discussion has moved to late payments generally, a question for freelancers and others who are subject to this: Would you be up for a service which allowed you to automatically share intelligence on which companies are late payers? Benefits would potentially be: - Find out in advance how late your will be paid - Early warning of creditors doing aggressive cash management (aka going bust) The idea would be that it would be funded by selling information about payers (not payees) eg, to insurance companies. NB the obvious way to implement this is to get access to bank transactions, which I know requires a lot of trust. But maybe with eg the Open Banking API, there's some way to do it such that you can trust that only the right information is shared.

p3rls 2y ago

Happens to the best of us

tatersolid 2y ago

I learned the hard way (major outage) back in the 1990s that no accounts payable or accounts receivable should ever be tied to a single person’s email address. You should use a shared mailbox account like ap@example.com when signing up for all services, or supply that as a separate billing address if the vendor allows. Then you make sure there are always at least three employees monitoring that mailbox, even as people come and go.