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Mozilla's announcement said, that the COVID-19 situation was responsible for them to restructure the company.

Can someone tell me how COVID situation explicitly affected Mozilla's revenue to such an extant? If anything, Internet companies were the least affected or in fact has been benefited from COVID situation.

Did the donors stop funding Mozilla or are they just using COVID-19 as as a scapegoat?

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It has nothing to do with donors. The less people use Firefox to search Google and click ads on that, the less money Mozilla gets. 90% of the revenue depends on that. When nobody can even go to vacation destinations, they won't click those hotel/travel ads.

Doesn't Mozilla get paid for search traffic, rather than Ad-conversion from that traffic[1]?

Although Google's ad revenue has dropped 8.1% in Q2 2020 when compared to same period last year[2], I don't think people 'searched less' due to COVID-19 on Firefox, Google trends shows search has indeed increased, but rather these Search Engines might have cut down their deal value for search traffic.

[1]https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-m...

[2]https://fortune.com/2020/07/30/alphabet-earnings-googl-stock...

Plenty of companies use covid19 as a ruse and a convenient excuse.

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