Newsletter subscribe forms went dead after account was disabled, unnoticed for weeks

The author of a Buttondown-hosted newsletter discovered that the account had been disabled, with notices dated 19 and 24 October, after opening the dashboard for another reason. Fetching the public newsletter URLs returned 404 responses, meaning the subscribe forms embedded in 26 posts had been submitting to nothing. A monitoring script run 29 times between 18 October and 10 November logged a subscriber count of zero each time, but it queried the API rather than checking whether readers could actually reach the signup page, so it never flagged the problem. The API continued to function on the disabled account, which made the zero reading look like an ordinary result rather than a failure. The Wayback Machine shows the public page was still live on 5 October, so the outage window can only be bounded to somewhere in the 35 days before discovery.