26.11.05 - Outage alert: FormSubmit is down, and your contact form emails may not be arriving
FormSubmit, a free service many websites use for their contact forms, has been down for about two days. On sites that use it, messages sent through the form are not reaching anyone’s inbox. Here is how to check whether you are affected, and the free fix we put in place on our own site.
This is Debitto, CEO of MetAI.
FormSubmit (formsubmit.co), a free service that many websites use for their contact forms, has been down for about two days (as of November 5).
On sites that use FormSubmit, messages sent through the contact form are not reaching anyone’s inbox. Visitors see the button stuck on “Sending…” or get an error. They think they sent a message and never got a reply, and the company never even finds out someone tried to get in touch.
Our own site used FormSubmit too, so we were affected. Here is how to check whether your site is affected, and what we did about it.
What is FormSubmit?
FormSubmit is a free service that forwards whatever is sent through an HTML form to your email address. You only need to point the form at it, with no server or code of your own. That is why it is popular with static sites (plain HTML, GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages and so on) and with sites that moved away from builders such as Webflow.
It is convenient, but it is a free third-party service: when it goes down, nobody tells you, and there is no way to know when it will be back. Earlier outages have been reported too.
How to check whether you are affected
- Look at where your form sends its data: if your site’s HTML or form settings mention “formsubmit.co”, you are using FormSubmit. If an agency built your site, ask them.
- Send a test message: fill in your own form and check whether the email arrives. If it hangs on “Sending…” or shows an error, you are affected.
- Look at your recent enquiries: if you have had none at all in the last few days, be suspicious.
What you can do right now
- Show other ways to reach you: a phone number, social media or a booking page somewhere visible, so fewer people give up.
- Messages sent during the outage will not come back: anything FormSubmit could not receive will not be delivered later, even once it recovers. If you know who might have written to you, contact them yourself.
- Don’t depend on a single outside service: switching to another form service only moves the problem, because that one can go down too. A backup route is the reliable fix.
The free fix we put in place on our site
We kept FormSubmit, and added a backup route that takes over automatically when it fails.
- The form sends to FormSubmit first, as before.
- If there is no answer within 8 seconds, or an error, it switches to the backup route. The visitor sees the usual “Thank you” message.
- The backup route saves the message on Cloudflare and sends a notification email to our own address. Replying to that email goes straight to the visitor.
- To stop spam and abuse, it checks which site the message comes from and limits how many messages can be sent.
It only uses free features of Cloudflare, where our site is hosted (Pages Functions, KV and Email Routing), so it costs nothing extra. Even now, with FormSubmit down, messages from our contact form arrive normally.
How MetAI can help
- Emergency form check: we check whether your contact form depends on an outside service, and whether messages are arriving right now.
- Backup route: we set up the same system we use, adapted to your site.
- Full site review: we find the parts of your site that depend on outside services and suggest a setup that keeps working when one of them fails.
Get in touch for a free 30-minute consultation.