Matt Mullenweg says WP Engine no longer has free WordPress.org access and directs WP Engine customers having trouble with their websites to WP Engine support
disrupting essential work for #WordPress users, agencies, freelancers, and plugin developers. Please read: https://wpenginestatus.com/... Brian Gardner / @bgardner : My heart is breaking. 💔 @pressable : If you're not happy with your hosting at WP Engine but you bought into an annual contract, we want to help set you free. Check out our special offer here: https://pressable.com/... Enrique Chavez / @tmeister : I totally agree with this take. Not only must #WPEngine win, but Matt should be removed from any position with decision-making power on any #WordPress entity (.org, .com and the foundation). @automattic : Automattic is deeply committed to open source, and we will continue to safeguard its ideals and the community that supports it. We want to make this clear: Using “WP” is not a trademark issue. Dan Norris / @thedannorris : Big test happening now for Open Source CMS tech. It's always been confusing to me what was allowed and what wasn't. We named WP Curve pretty much because we saw @wpengine and others use that wording and assumed it was OK, but it's always been a grey area. Ryan McCue / @rmccue : For the continued health and vibrancy of the WordPress project, WP Engine must win. https://journal.rmccue.io/... David Vogelpohl / @wpdavidv : Schools, governments, emergency service websites, churches, non profits, healthcare websites. These are just some of the types of important websites Mullenwonka is exposing to security risks by blocking their sites from accessing .org. DANGEROUS, SHAMEFUL, WRONG. Brian Gardner / @bgardner : Many things out of my control, but some are not. I will continue to: ✴︎ Advocate for #WordPress. ✴︎ Make myself available to you. ✴︎ Create for the community. Please reach out if there is any way I can support you or your business. Scott Hendison / @shendison : It took @wpengine support chat over 20 minutes to tell me that “this is a known issue”, and they'll update me by email, but NOW I know that it's an issue for ALL websites you host? WTF?!? Why not tell your support chat? Is this related to the @photomatt criticism / drama from [image] @patchstackapp : All @patchstackapp users with protection turned on at #WPengine will continue to receive virtual patches to all of the latest security vulnerabilities as usual. Meanwhile, we hope the situation resolves soon and users are able to update to patched versions ASAP. Thomas Frank / @tomfrankly : This is absolutely the wrong way to handle this dispute. All my sites were previously on WP Engine. If I hadn't moved them a couple years back, I'd be feeling pretty screwed right now. Even though I did, I'm still pretty angry on behalf of all the site owners who did nothing Josh Manders / @joshmanders : Automattic was an investor in WPEngine's Series A round. They had zero issues with what WPEngine has been doing until now. Imagine if I convinced Vercel to invest in my series A for Primcloud because I was going to have specialized hosting for Next.js and then a decade later Tim Bouchard / @timbouchard : Matt's out of line. If he wants to waste money chasing bogus legal claims he should do it without affecting the people. Absolute insanity #WordPress Stephen Shankland / @stshank : The fight between @WordPress and @wpengine just got orders of magnitude uglier, with the latter's paying customers now unable to update their site plugins (which is to say secure their websites). WordPress statement: https://x.com/... Brad Williams / @williamsba : This now affects all of us. This is no longer anti-WPE, this is anti-WordPress. This hurts us all. Unreal. @mrlanphear : This latest stunt by Matt Mullenweg is unconscionable. You're not harming @wpengine. You're harming their customers. WordPress' customers. My agency's customers. You're about to make my life as a developer a living hell. Fix this before you can't undo the damage. @photomatt @fjzeit : Imagine if every large open source initiative went daggers at the commercial operations that profit from it without suitable financial support in return. Sure, the WP drama has other angles around appropriate conduct wrt impact upon users but the fundamental issue is solid. Daniel Cid / @danielcid : To all WordPress and Linux users out there. Image how would react if Ubuntu (for example) blocked your servers from receiving updates and installing new packages because you never contributed back or donated to Ubuntu. If they found the IP ranges for all your servers and got it @thespacedmonkey : My thoughts on WP Engine drama. I feel like saying that WPE doesn't contribute to WordPress and WordPress ecosystem seems a little disingenuous. WPE, has sponsored countless WordCamps and local meetups. There bought and kept open source plugins like ACF & wpgraphql Vinny Green / @vinnysgreen : Let's triage the obvious problem before we start concerning ourselves with anything that appears as problem. WP Engine and Silverlake have never been in position to screw up WordPress as bad as Matt is screwing it up now. Ben May / @benjmay : Wondering if this is a new option lol [image] Dave Martin / @itsdavemartin : I shared my thoughts on Matt's recent comments. Here's my summary of the primary issue: WPEngine extracts a great deal of value from the WordPress ecosystem without giving much back to the WordPress commons in return. You can read my full thoughts here: https://davemart.in/... Alex Sexton / @slexaxton : genuinely have no clue about this wordpress drama but I feel compelled to say that I was on the board of the jQuery foundation during some of the glory years and @photomatt was the ~largest donor. definitely puts his money where his mouth is in supporting dependent oss. Téa Smith / @tealou : This is an absolutely disgusting move from @WordPress So in order to maintain continuity for clients, I need to eat the time sent on manual updates or migrate away from an excellent hosting provider. Not good enough. I stand with @wpengine Theo / @t3dotgg : WordPress will never die, but today they killed the trust their community had in them. Laurie Voss / @seldo : Meanwhile over in Wordpress land things are escalating wildly. You can't power 40% of the web and act this way, people will fork your shit. Dustin Curtis / @dcurtis : Automattic's bizarre, unconvincing fight with WP Engine is bad for Wordpress, bad for open source software, and bad for the web. There has to be more to the story than a petty fight over disabling revision history. It makes no sense. Dave Amirault / @ozskier : This is absolutely insane and such a disgusting abuse of power by @photomatt. I have clients using @wpengine and now they can't easily install plugins or update themes. #WordPress [image] Tara Claeys / @taraclaeys : @LilJimmi @photomatt Massive panic and confusion coming from my clients who own their own accounts at WPE but have no idea what that means. It will cost them money to move, and cost us many hours to access their DNS and help move their sites to ... possibly the next company that gets banned? Matt Mullenweg / @photomatt : @TaraClaeys @LilJimmi No other company has attacked https://wordpress.org/, so you should be fine. @davidtaggart : This Wordpress vs WP Engine mess is the dumbest damn thing I have ever seen. Whatever the backstory ends up being @photomatt just shot the WP ecosystem in the stomach. It will see a slow and steady death. Right now like 40% of sites are on WP. In 10 years it will be 20% or Matt Mullenweg / @photomatt : @DavidTaggart Let's check back in ten years! I set my calendar. Robert DeVore / @deviorobert : @DuaneStorey @schutzsmith “they have full access to the GPL code. they just need to host and run it themselves” - @photomatt I'm no mathematician, but I think Silver Lake may have enough money to clone https://wp.org/ and run an independent repository of the themes and plugins + core files found Matt Mullenweg / @photomatt : @hashim_warren ... WP Engine controls the code on your site, as they demonstrated by blocking the meetups widget. They should be able to copy all the GPL code in the repository and provide it to their customers. Matt Mullenweg / @photomatt : @init_sh Nope! None of them have publicly attacked me and https://wordpress.org/. Matt Mullenweg / @photomatt : @deviorobert ... They do, they just don't want to spend it. It will cost them a lot more than the 8% deal they turned down. Carl Hancock / @carlhancock : For the record, if someone sued me I'd stop supporting them too unless I was compelled to do so by a judge. Just saying. Matt Mullenweg / @photomatt : @bgardner @wpengine Happy to unblock you, drop your legal claims and get a trademark license. @raymmar_ : This is absolutely bonkers. I've been a @wpengine customer for almost a decade and now I'm being punished arbitrarily by a so called “open source” platform. This is a sad day for the WordPress community. Joshua Benton / @jbenton : This is getting very ugly. Keith Devon / @keithdevon : @WordPress Some of my clients use WP Engine. You're hurting them. You're hurting my business. You're hurting the WordPress community. Forums: Hacker News : WordPress.org bans WP Engine r/webdev : WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org See also Mediagazer
The RegisterThomas Claburn
Context & Ripple Effects
The cutoff followed Mullenweg's statement a day earlier that Automattic had sought a licensing agreement with WP Engine, framing access to a shared project resource as part of a commercial dispute rather than a routine hosting issue. Automattic's stated licensing push is the immediate backdrop.
The dispute later widened beyond repository access: WordPress moved to fork WP Engine-developed Advanced Custom Fields, while WP Engine sought a court order to restore access. The ACF fork and WP Engine's injunction request show how a conflict over project governance reached both software distribution and legal remedies.
First-order effects
WP Engine-hosted sites and the agencies, freelancers, and plugin developers serving them face interrupted access to WordPress.org updates, leaving WP Engine to support affected customers directly and potentially delaying maintenance work.
The access cutoff turns WP Engine's dispute with Automattic and WordPress leadership into an operational issue for its customers, including possible exposure where plugin or theme updates cannot be obtained normally.
Second-order effects
Rival hosts can use migration offers and support continuity as a sales lever, as Pressable's offer to customers under annual contracts illustrates; WP Engine must spend more on retention, support, and alternative update paths.
Plugin and theme vendors serving WP Engine customers may need to field more compatibility and distribution requests, while customers reassess how much their hosting provider depends on a project-controlled repository.
Third-order effects
If access to core open-source distribution infrastructure can be restricted during commercial disputes, hosts and agencies will place greater value on independent update, backup, and migration capabilities rather than treating repository access as a given.
The episode intensifies governance scrutiny around the overlap between WordPress project control and Automattic's commercial interests, an issue later raised explicitly in coverage of the conflict-of-interest concerns.
The trend: This is one data point in the growing strategic importance—and liability—of control over open-source distribution layers relied on by commercial service providers.
The way this is written makes WordPress look bad. Petty management, opaque accusations, the whole thing. I don't know what went down, but this does not look like a mature reaction from the organization that powers 40%(?) of websites. https://wordpress.org/...
Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, has misused his control of WordPress to interfere with WP Engine customers' access to WordPress.org, asserting that he did so because WP Engine filed litigation against Wordpress.org. This simply is not true.
Quote: “I feel for impacted end users. But that they were impacted at all is WP Engine's fault and responsibility to fix. They've been providing access to free services hosted on https://wordpress.org/ and, due to a major disagreement on community contributions and trademark
Pending their legal claims and litigation against https://wordpress.org/, WP Engine no longer has free access to https://wordpress.org/'s resources. https://wordpress.org/... #WordPress
Not being able to do @WordPress updates because of the @photomatt/@wpengine fight is infuriating. For a small nonprofit, being caught in the middle of this could be costly if we need to migrate our sites to a new host. That money/time should be used for our mission.
Today in Matt destroys the WordPress community: you can't add plugins directly from the .org repo if you have a WP Engine site. And I can confirm that this is happening. https://www.reddit.com/... [image]
More info: WordPress.org has also blocked @heyflywheel customers from updating and installing plugins and themes via WP Admin-disrupting essential work for #WordPress users, agencies, freelancers, and plugin developers.
I want to share: https://wordpress.org/ has blocked @wpengine customers from updating and installing plugins and themes via WP Admin—disrupting essential work for #WordPress users, agencies, freelancers, and plugin developers. Please read: https://wpenginestatus.com/...
If you're not happy with your hosting at WP Engine but you bought into an annual contract, we want to help set you free. Check out our special offer here: https://pressable.com/...
I totally agree with this take. Not only must #WPEngine win, but Matt should be removed from any position with decision-making power on any #WordPress entity (.org, .com and the foundation).
Automattic is deeply committed to open source, and we will continue to safeguard its ideals and the community that supports it. We want to make this clear: Using “WP” is not a trademark issue.
Big test happening now for Open Source CMS tech. It's always been confusing to me what was allowed and what wasn't. We named WP Curve pretty much because we saw @wpengine and others use that wording and assumed it was OK, but it's always been a grey area.
Schools, governments, emergency service websites, churches, non profits, healthcare websites. These are just some of the types of important websites Mullenwonka is exposing to security risks by blocking their sites from accessing .org. DANGEROUS, SHAMEFUL, WRONG.
Many things out of my control, but some are not. I will continue to: ✴︎ Advocate for #WordPress. ✴︎ Make myself available to you. ✴︎ Create for the community. Please reach out if there is any way I can support you or your business.
It took @wpengine support chat over 20 minutes to tell me that “this is a known issue”, and they'll update me by email, but NOW I know that it's an issue for ALL websites you host? WTF?!? Why not tell your support chat? Is this related to the @photomatt criticism / drama from [im…
All @patchstackapp users with protection turned on at #WPengine will continue to receive virtual patches to all of the latest security vulnerabilities as usual. Meanwhile, we hope the situation resolves soon and users are able to update to patched versions ASAP.
This is absolutely the wrong way to handle this dispute. All my sites were previously on WP Engine. If I hadn't moved them a couple years back, I'd be feeling pretty screwed right now. Even though I did, I'm still pretty angry on behalf of all the site owners who did nothing
Automattic was an investor in WPEngine's Series A round. They had zero issues with what WPEngine has been doing until now. Imagine if I convinced Vercel to invest in my series A for Primcloud because I was going to have specialized hosting for Next.js and then a decade later
The fight between @WordPress and @wpengine just got orders of magnitude uglier, with the latter's paying customers now unable to update their site plugins (which is to say secure their websites). WordPress statement: https://x.com/...
This latest stunt by Matt Mullenweg is unconscionable. You're not harming @wpengine. You're harming their customers. WordPress' customers. My agency's customers. You're about to make my life as a developer a living hell. Fix this before you can't undo the damage. @photomatt
Imagine if every large open source initiative went daggers at the commercial operations that profit from it without suitable financial support in return. Sure, the WP drama has other angles around appropriate conduct wrt impact upon users but the fundamental issue is solid.
To all WordPress and Linux users out there. Image how would react if Ubuntu (for example) blocked your servers from receiving updates and installing new packages because you never contributed back or donated to Ubuntu. If they found the IP ranges for all your servers and got it
My thoughts on WP Engine drama. I feel like saying that WPE doesn't contribute to WordPress and WordPress ecosystem seems a little disingenuous. WPE, has sponsored countless WordCamps and local meetups. There bought and kept open source plugins like ACF & wpgraphql
Let's triage the obvious problem before we start concerning ourselves with anything that appears as problem. WP Engine and Silverlake have never been in position to screw up WordPress as bad as Matt is screwing it up now.
I shared my thoughts on Matt's recent comments. Here's my summary of the primary issue: WPEngine extracts a great deal of value from the WordPress ecosystem without giving much back to the WordPress commons in return. You can read my full thoughts here: https://davemart.in/...
genuinely have no clue about this wordpress drama but I feel compelled to say that I was on the board of the jQuery foundation during some of the glory years and @photomatt was the ~largest donor. definitely puts his money where his mouth is in supporting dependent oss.
This is an absolutely disgusting move from @WordPress So in order to maintain continuity for clients, I need to eat the time sent on manual updates or migrate away from an excellent hosting provider. Not good enough. I stand with @wpengine
Automattic's bizarre, unconvincing fight with WP Engine is bad for Wordpress, bad for open source software, and bad for the web. There has to be more to the story than a petty fight over disabling revision history. It makes no sense.
This is absolutely insane and such a disgusting abuse of power by @photomatt. I have clients using @wpengine and now they can't easily install plugins or update themes. #WordPress [image]
@LilJimmi @photomatt Massive panic and confusion coming from my clients who own their own accounts at WPE but have no idea what that means. It will cost them money to move, and cost us many hours to access their DNS and help move their sites to ... possibly the next company that …
This Wordpress vs WP Engine mess is the dumbest damn thing I have ever seen. Whatever the backstory ends up being @photomatt just shot the WP ecosystem in the stomach. It will see a slow and steady death. Right now like 40% of sites are on WP. In 10 years it will be 20% or
@DuaneStorey @schutzsmith “they have full access to the GPL code. they just need to host and run it themselves” - @photomatt I'm no mathematician, but I think Silver Lake may have enough money to clone https://wp.org/ and run an independent repository of the themes and plugins + …
@hashim_warren ... WP Engine controls the code on your site, as they demonstrated by blocking the meetups widget. They should be able to copy all the GPL code in the repository and provide it to their customers.
This is absolutely bonkers. I've been a @wpengine customer for almost a decade and now I'm being punished arbitrarily by a so called “open source” platform. This is a sad day for the WordPress community.