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

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.

Why is a SaaS locking out a fairly high-profile customer like this, and publicly airing B2B accounts-receivable drama, to the customer&#x27;s community?<p>How big can the bill be, for something you could run on a 20 year-old PC?<p>Given the strange coincidence with the social media outrage over TOU fiasco, I don&#x27;t know who to be scratching my puzzled head at here.

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.<p>Better version would be „One of Mozilla sites is in read-only mode…“

Organization with hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue and spend can&#x27;t maintain servers?<p>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.<p>Really, I can&#x27;t lose any more respect for Mozilla at this point. It&#x27;s all gone.

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.

&gt; <i>This site is in read-only mode because there are overdue hosting payments.</i><p>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&#x27;t spread to Mozilla forums, where it might reach a wider audience?

The title should be:<p>&quot;Mozilla&#x27;s Discourse forum is in read-only mode due to overdue hosting payments&quot;<p>The current title gives the false impression that mozilla.org is down.

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

Given that the discussion has moved to late payments generally, a question for freelancers and others who are subject to this:<p>Would you be up for a service which allowed you to automatically share intelligence on which companies are late payers? Benefits would potentially be:<p>- Find out in advance how late your will be paid<p>- Early warning of creditors doing aggressive cash management (aka going bust)<p>The idea would be that it would be funded by selling information about payers (not payees) eg, to insurance companies.<p>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&#x27;s some way to do it such that you can trust that only the right information is shared.

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.

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.

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

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.<p>This website fucking sucks.

Happens to the best of us

This doesn&#x27;t feel like an oversight or an accident. It&#x27;ll be interesting to see how they try to explain this away.