A glitch is breaking all Firefox extensions

Did you just open Firefox only to find all of your extensions disabled and/or otherwise not working?

You're not alone, and it's nothing you did.

Reports are pouring in of a glitch that has spontaneously disabled effectively all Firefox extensions.

Each extension is now being listed as a "legacy" extension, alongside a warning that it "could not be verified for use in Firefox and has been disabled".

A ticket submitted to Mozilla's Bugzilla bug tracker first hit at around 5:40 PM Pacific, and suggests the sudden failure is due to a code signing certificate built into the browser that expired just after 5 PM (or midnight on May 4th in UTC time).

Because the glitch stems from an underlying certificate, re-installing extensions won't work - if you try, you'll likely just be met with a different error message. Getting extensions back for everyone is going to require Mozilla to issue a patch.

In a post on the company's forum, Mozilla Add-ons Community Manager Caitlin Neiman writes:

At about 6:10 PST we received a report that a certificate issue for Firefox is causing add-ons to stop working and add-on installs to fail.

Our team is actively working on a fix. We will update as soon as we have more information.

Meanwhile, on Twitter:

So sorry for the issue we're having with add-ons right now!

We're working hard to fix it and will keep you updated.

- Firefox (@firefox) May 4, 2019

Update, March 4th 11 AM Pacific: In a blog post, Mozilla says the issue has now been fixed in the standard desktop version of its browser, though some versions (like Firefox for Android) will need a separate update. The patch for the desktop version should apply automatically within a few hours. The company writes:

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.