I’m beginning to feel like a journalist rather than someone who designs websites and creates apps that run on mobile devices. I guess that’s the cost of touching the SOPA can of worms. Of course, if I was a journalist, I talk about these things the minute they happen. Instead I wait a week to let the dust settle.
On February 15th, JotForm.com went down without warning. When the company called their hosting company (GoDaddy), they were told that their site had been taken down as part of an ongoing investigation and referred to the requesting agent at the Secret Service.
There was no court action, no one told JotForm they were being taken offline and JotForm’s business, for all intents and purposes, was closed. It was as if a Secret Service agent could close every McDonalds in the country… and the owners of McDonalds only found out when they started getting calls from customers asking why can’t my kid get a happy meal?… and the owners could only say what do you mean? We never close!
JotForm does something different than McDonalds. They let people easily create custom forms. Need a simple way to survey people or want to do a registration form for a one-off event? JotForm might just be able to help you. They’re good enough at it, that host over 2,000,000 forms for two hundred thousands individuals and businesses.
Interested in finding music or movies (legal or otherwise)? Nope, they can’t help you. Interested in child pornography? Nope, they can’t help you with that. That’s because they don’t host content: music, movies, articles, etc. Want to use their forms to pfish for people’s credit card or account information? You probably won’t hang around long. They suspended 65,000 accounts last year for that type of activity.
When the company’s co-founder (Aytekin Tank) contacted the Secret Service agent who requested that GoDaddy take them offline, the agent “told me she is busy and she asked for my phone number, and told me they will get back to me within this week, I told them we are a Web service with hundreds of thousands of users, so this is a matter of urgency, and we are ready to cooperate fully. I was ready to shutdown any form they request and provide any information we have about the user. Unfortunately, she told me she needs to look at the case which she can do in a few days. I called her many times again to check about the case, but she seems to be getting irritated with me.” (from ycombinator.com).
The next day, at 5PM, they were back online. JotForm isn’t saying how many customers they lost but based on the coverage, it was clear there was a real impact on their revenue.
Wondering why they were suspended? They still don’t know. Wondering if this is over for them? They can’t tell you. Wondering what will prevent this in the future? They have no idea. Have a web-based business and wondering what to do if this happens to you? Hope that they give you the agent’s name and phone number and that you can annoy her into lifting the suspension (instead of putting the case on the backburner until all your customers are gone).
Me? I’m going to blog about something else, anything else next week. Even if Google gets shuttered, you’ll have to wait until the week after next to see me blog about it.
I pulled information for this entry from ArsTechnica, CNET and The JotForm Blog.