Github Education - Organization Upgrades Reverting after 24 Hours

[benjamid]

Hi everyone,

After a few years of having no issues with Github Education, I have had issues over the last year where organizations reverted back and needed to be re-upgraded. I did so and had no issues until September 11 when unexpectedly all my orgs downgraded. I put in a re-verification request, which was accepted and it said that benefits would be reenabled. The verification request was at:
https://education.github.com/discount_requests/application

So I re-upgraded the orgs here:
https://education.github.com/globalcampus/teacher

However, in an odd turn of events, when I re-upgrade the orgs they immediately downgrade the next day without notice.

You can see they expired Sept 12, then expire again on Sept 13. So I re-enabled it for enough hours to add students to their capstone project directory, then already the org is expired by morning after I tell them. There's no email, so I literally just need to log in and check on the status.

This clearly has to be a bug, or a series of bugs.

Expected behavior:

• Expiring faculty accounts should receive warning and a grace period to re-activate, of at least 1 month.
• Org accounts should not downgrade during this expiration period.
• Renewing a faculty account should maintain benefits during the verification period (it's just supposed to be 3 days, right?)
• Expiring org upgrades should generate an email for each one, to allow addressing issues
• Upgrading an org should not immediately downgrade the following day

Actual behavior:

• Emails do not appear to be generated to prompt for renewing faculty verification (or are currently broken?)
• All org accounts are downgraded without any email notice.
• Orgs also changed to a state where they generate bills, which could be a huge out of pocket cost for a teacher, who would not see it until the invoice at the end of the month ($4 per student in a team, per month).
• Org upgrades appear unstable during the verification process, allowing upgrades but then quickly expiring them.

Action Items:

• Support team: Does somebody read these who can resolve the issue?
• Features: Is anybody working on features to ensure smooth re-verification?

[benjamid]

Though I suppose optimistically, if the behavior persists, I can tell people I've been moved to the "Github Educator Once-Daily Plan." :)