If Mozilla Firefox is your default browser, you may have noticed that some of your add-ons stopped working properly around 8:00 AM this morning. Some of you are probably wondering why; that’s because of the “expiration of intermediate signing cert”.
The bug was reported to Mozilla’s bug tracker, as reported by Engadget. The former’s product lead, Kev Needham, said in a statement that the company is aware of the issue and is working hard to fix it.
We're deeply sorry for this occurrence. Currently the signature verification process is not working, causing all installed add-ons and themes to be disabled. We are working on a fix to be released ASAP. Also you can check the status here : https://t.co/iUXAWXrUtP -GF
— Firefox 🔥 (@firefox) May 4, 2019
As mentioned earlier, the cause of this issue is due to the signing method used by Mozilla for add-ons, some of which have expired. If you’ve set your system clock to be faster than the actual time, then this would’ve hit you earlier as well.
For now, one of the few ways you can get around this is by turning your clock back to before the signatures expired, which is 8:00 AM of this morning (midnight GMT/UTC to be exact). Other methods involve using dev versions and disabling signing check, but that’s more dangerous than it’s worth.
(Source: Mozilla, Reddit via Engadget)
UPDATE (11:50 PM):
Firefox’s team has since released an update to the situation, as posted on its blog:
Late on Friday May 3rd, we became aware of an issue with Firefox that prevented existing and new add-ons from running or being installed. We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to people who use Firefox.
Our team has identified and rolled-out a fix for all Firefox Desktop users on Release, Beta and Nightly. The fix will be automatically applied in the background within the next few hours. No active steps need to be taken to make add-ons work again. In particular, please do not delete and/or re-install any add-ons as an attempt to fix the issue. Deleting an add-on removes any data associated with it, where disabling and re-enabling does not.
All in all, things should be getting back to normal, as we speak.
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