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

[sylvestre]

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.

[trompetenaccoun]

With all other recent news from Mozilla (large scale firings, multiple leadership changes, the new ToS and removal of the promise to never sell our data...), I won't read too much into it but simply add it to the list.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43185909

[zx8080]

Thanks for the explanation!

Is there any chance to move away from the Discourse? It's a bit too slow (on any page opening), but the biggest issue is its hostile habit of catching the browser "find in page" hotkey (replacing the local find with the remote site search).

[throwaway67743]

Given Mozilla's continual frittering away of cash, would it not show some constraint to not pay for "cloud" hosted stuff for things that could easily be hosted by Mozilla and probably for less (with a less absurd choice of software) - it's already pretty much game over anyway, as a long time defender of Mozilla it is impossible these days to argue.

[sylvestre]

and it is now fixed!

[issafram]

You work for Mozilla?

[neilv]

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]

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.

[_blk]

Totally agree but at least I don't know more about how long this has been developing for and what attempts have been made at curing it - if this is indeed the intention... There's a thread here suggesting the idea that it's a stunt to get extort more money from donors. While I wouldn't go quite as far, I think it's undeniable that there's a rift between long time users of Mozilla products and their current strategies (or at least their tactics if they don't have a strategy). I still believe Firefox is the best browser out there, mainly because they've resisted the temptation to take ad blocking APIs away but having to disable all suggested xyz, save to cloud, experiments, user metrics, ... Just takes a while and leaves you with little trust.

[weird-eye-issue]

Well you don't know how long it has been unpaid for and I think it's good that it's transparent so that at least there is no confusion about why it's in read-only mode

[hitekker]

The only thing Discourse said was "This site is in read-only mode because there are overdue hosting payments". It's a system message that's automatically shown when the customer forgets to pay their bills.

The drama comes from Mozilla's nonpayment, not Discourse's policy. Weird to try to pin the blame on Discourse.

[nikanj]

> How big can the bill be, for something you could run on a 20 year-old PC?

Easily 7 figures, possibly 8 figures. Enterprise sales are a weird realm.

[ivan_gammel]

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…“

[johnklos]

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]

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.

[ashoeafoot]

I guess the money stops flowing when you di not need a monopoly fig leave, because the monopoly busters are exited.

[StressedDev]

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.

[dijit]

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.

[Rexxar]

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.

[PeterStuer]

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.

[0xbadcafebee]

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!

[neilv]

> 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?

[throwaway150]

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.

[CaliforniaKarl]

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

[ajb]

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.

[tatersolid]

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 [e-mail] 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.

[jisnsm]

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.

[drpossum]

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.

[josteink]

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]

> 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.

[HackerThemAll]

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.

[bolognafairy]

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]

yep so much manufactured outrage and fake drama on several stories today.

[p3rls]

Happens to the best of us

[petesergeant]

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.

[chaoskitty]

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

[nom]

Why? Are you getting bad vibes or something?

It is way more likely to be an oversight.

[HackerThemAll]

Look for comments from "sylvestre".