Quick update on some billing issues

We experienced strange issues yesterday with WooCommerce, the e-commerce platform we use for billing, subscriptions, and memberships. From what we can tell, this impacted only a small number of users. But I wanted to at least explain things in case you were one of them.

Four users were double-billed when they paid for or renewed a monthly or annual Thurrott Premium subscription. Two contacted us, and two did not, but we refunded the second charge in each case regardless.

Less obviously, we experienced a few dozen billing errors over the course of about 24 hours. Those appear to have corrected themselves over time, meaning they were successfully completed, because of the way the system works. This was more of an issue for us—me and Laurent—than for users of the site because these errors appeared in the backend pages we use to post articles, manage forum threads and users, and so on. But this was what alerted us to a bigger issue somewhere in the backend of the site.

We have an incredible web team that I want to promote. But since I don’t have that permission yet, let me just say that its leader spent much of this morning figuring out the cause of these problems, which was a cascading series of small bugs that involved integration between parts of WooCommerce, WordPress, and OpenWeb, and that it’s fixed now.

Because this is related to billing, I want to explain that we (Thurrott.com) do not see, collect, or store any payment information. As noted, we use WooCommerce as a platform, and it accepts payments on our behalf via two other services, Stripe (for credit card payments) and PayPal.

I’m guessing most users didn’t notice anything. But it’s possible there were a few small glitches here and there as we made updates to the backend of the site. And I want to be as transparent as possible, especially when it’s something sensitive like billing.

Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks!

Paul