Let's Encrypt has been working normally for most of the day. There was a ~90 minute period during which some of our users would have received a higher error rate due to upstream networking issues, but the majority of requests were successful even during that period.
It seems our status.io notes are being misinterpreted as much more severe than they were intended to reflect.
Edit: Note that this was written in response to a previous submission title implying that Let's Encrypt was entirely down most of the day.
I'm not sure if your higher error rate is sticky per user or something, but I've tried 10+ times throughout the day and have had 0 successes. They all come back as internal server error. That's why I eventually posted.
It would not have been sticky for the entire day. If it was sticky at all, it would have been only during the 90 minute period I referenced. It's most likely that there is some other issue with how you're requesting the cert. Folks can help debug at: https://community.letsencrypt.org/
Why are you trying? Doesn’t Caddy (or something) just takes care of this well in advance and should have no issues with one or several days of my service at all at any time?
Edit: my bad. I’ve tried as well recently, when you’re rushing to get your new domain up of course…
That explains why one of my IoT vendors is using an expired certificate.
I wish Firefox would just give a mild warning for a recently expired certificate, instead of treating it the same as a true man-in-the-middle attach. It's not like someone who couldn't factor the private key in 200 days could in 201 days or even 300 days.
I'm convinced that we'd have better security, if we didn't have so much security theater. You'd think TLS is useless, from the warning my phone gives if I connected to a public Wi-Fi AP, but then again there's nothing in TLS (or WPA) that prevents it from being used in a way that is completely useless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1si1y5lvkk
> That explains why one of my IoT vendors is using an expired certificate.
I don't think so. There was a dip in success rates for 90 minutes today, but nobody should be renewing their certificate within 90 minutes of expiration. If you're at that point, something went wrong weeks ago.
"nobody should be renewing their certificate within 90 minutes of expiration"
You obviously haven't worked with hardware guys.
"I mean, what's the point of those last 30 days if you need to renew it 30 days before expiration? Why not just renew it before it expires? If I'm required to renew it 30 days before the expiration date then the expiration date is a lie, isn't it?"
> If I'm required to renew it 30 days before the expiration date then the expiration date is a lie, isn't it?
Many countries won't let you enter if your passport expires less than 6 months after your planned departure date. Basically the effective validity of a passport is 0.5 years less than the period you pay for.
Mostly 90 days, and we recommend renewing at 60 days for 90 day certs. That gives more than four weeks of leeway.
If you're one of the few early adopters of short-lived (6-day) certs you should renew at 3 days, giving you 3 days for a successful renewal. A 90 minute outage, even if it was a full outage, would not interfere with a successful renewal.
90 days moving to 45 but you can and should renew earlier than that. Automating this process means that you should be request a new certificates roughly 60 days (or 30 soon) after the issuance of the previous certificate. That way you would have plenty of time to deal with renewal issues. The process for renewal should have back off and retries built in. This prevents a situation where a down time for the issuer means that your production environments are non-functional.
Certificate expiry is less severe than an untrusted issuer or a host mismatch.
The former is most likely an administrative error (ie: someone forgot to renew, or the auto-renew is failing). The latter is more likely to be an MTM attack.
I'm not sure how you would use an expired cert as an attack vector. By loading in an old cert into an expired domain so you could spoof older content?
Revocation information may not be available for expired certificates. Not that it matters much because the last time I checked revocation didn't really work for non-expired certificates either, but I think that (+ the risk of people treating expired certificates as worthless and thus increasing the risk of exposure) is the main reason.
Also of course domains changing owners, but again... I don't think we have good monitoring for that during the current long lifetime, so maybe a grace period where a warning is shown but it's easier to click through would be a good idea. Perhaps combined with a requirement to keep revocation information (and keep revoking expired certificates) X days past expiry.
There are reasons browsers do things the way they do.
Experience and user studies have shown that users have a hard time decoding what error messages mean. "This certificate is expired, but only for a little while" isn't meaningful for people who don't have a mental model of what a certificate is.
Furthermore, "downgrading" warnings increases the incentive to ignore issues, potentially causing more problems down the line.
But it's only the extreme warning that alerts the website (usually via a customer complaining) that the cert hasn't been renewed. Having the lesser warning just kicks the can down the road.
The IoT should have updated the certs weeks in advance. If they haven't done it by day 0 then their process is broken and delaying the scary warning to say day +5 won't solve anything.
A warning with a clear clickthrough button would work for alerting - the default TLS warnings are designed to be somewhat hard to bypass to make people think twice.
That is right, but one thing is not like the other. You have always been free to set expiry low on your own certificates, but that is not the same as enforcing it on everyones ceritificate.
> Questions come up: do you block a request if you fail to download the latest CRL? How often do you refresh it?
In the before times we left settings like this up to competent system administrators to decide based on risk and not hardcoded by a handful of people at Google.
Stale news. Mozilla introduced a new solution for certificate revocation that solves nearly all the problems with old methods. While it hasn't really taken off outside of Firefox, that's mostly because Google and Apple haven't embraced it because they are too busy trying to shorten certificate life unnecessarily.
Let's Encrypt is operating normally. If you're having trouble, please post the details on the community forum so that folks can help you out. There is external monitoring in place.
I use acme.sh for certs on my personal server and was a little surprised when it started using ZeroSSL by default. Despite being more "corporate" I decided to roll with it and it's worked just fine.
None. Big tech intentionally made Let's Encrypt a single point of giant failure.
> And in case none exists, what does it take to build one?
A new Internet and Web standards stack. The whole problem is self-imposed -- we could have published self-signed Ed25519 keys on the DNS instead, and the result would be more secure than whatever it is we have now.
The banner's colour is based on the "Incident Status;" it's green because services are currently operational. It would be yellow or red if the impact were more severe.
Using only color to communicate the status is confusing. If you want to communicate something, it's often best to just say it. The color can be a visual reinforcement of that. Then your explanation would not be needed.
But that's not were the confusion is created. I don't even see the status field on mobile without scrolling. You don't have a missing status field, you have too much confusion, because the field and/or the color have a placement mismatch.
No, it's not. You can always switch to a different SSL provider. There are other free ones (as mentioned in other comments).
However, thinking about how to make your own setup more robust without having to manually change configuration when one SSL provider stops working is a good exercise. I wonder if you can just get your server's private key signed by multiple SSL providers, and serve multiple certificates to clients, and whether all browsers handle that correctly.
Nothing is a point of failure if you can switch but that's not really true unless you have fail-over.
If LE was to go nope right now, how fast could you move your stack from LE?
You can't use multiple SSL certificates as redundancy. You could probably create something bespoke with a Load Balancer and SSL offloading but that's just more overhead for really nothing.
Hot take, but in general single points of failure are less of an issue than it seems because usually outages simply aren't that common. Meanwhile maintaining whole infrastructure to avoid single point of failure is often very expensive.
You are getting down-voted for this, which I think is a bit unfair. (I expect I'll get the same.)
Although you don't expand your thesis, as a general feeling, I agree. But, to be fair, it has always been thus, and it has been this way in every forum ever.
I'm old enough to remember the irony in "I read about it on the internet so it must be true" statements, which have existed since the internet was News (NNTP) not web.
In truth, any time you get a random group of people together, of different ages and backgrounds, all of whom self-describe as "smart" you're going to get a lot of chaff mixed in with the wheat.
To some extent you need to simply ignore the nonsense. There's plenty of it and "correcting people who are wrong" is seldom received well.
Let's Encrypt has been working normally for most of the day. There was a ~90 minute period during which some of our users would have received a higher error rate due to upstream networking issues, but the majority of requests were successful even during that period.
It seems our status.io notes are being misinterpreted as much more severe than they were intended to reflect.
Edit: Note that this was written in response to a previous submission title implying that Let's Encrypt was entirely down most of the day.
I'm not sure if your higher error rate is sticky per user or something, but I've tried 10+ times throughout the day and have had 0 successes. They all come back as internal server error. That's why I eventually posted.
It would not have been sticky for the entire day. If it was sticky at all, it would have been only during the 90 minute period I referenced. It's most likely that there is some other issue with how you're requesting the cert. Folks can help debug at: https://community.letsencrypt.org/
I ran the exact same command now and it's working, so it is possible I was unlucky and was hitting all the worst possible cases.
Could it be that he was simply throttled while retrying? That seems plausible, and it would make it seem like a long outage.
I updated the post title to say (Fixed) now.
Since Let's Encrypt wasn't down most of the day if would be helpful if you could update the title to reflect that.
I updated the title. Let me know if you think it's more accurate. It did appear as down for me though.
Yeah, thanks
I did not intend this to hit the top of the front page lol. I just posted it and then came back 15 minutes later to it having exploded.
No worries
Thanks for securing the web
Thank them for making the web depend on a single US-based shady org, as if DNS was not enough.
Feel free to launch your own CA.
No-no, I would rather go back to the good old HTTP/1.1.
P.S. JS injection into TCP packets and other meddling with passthrough data should be banned legally, not technically via encryption.
Why are you trying? Doesn’t Caddy (or something) just takes care of this well in advance and should have no issues with one or several days of my service at all at any time?
Edit: my bad. I’ve tried as well recently, when you’re rushing to get your new domain up of course…
That explains why one of my IoT vendors is using an expired certificate.
I wish Firefox would just give a mild warning for a recently expired certificate, instead of treating it the same as a true man-in-the-middle attach. It's not like someone who couldn't factor the private key in 200 days could in 201 days or even 300 days.
I'm convinced that we'd have better security, if we didn't have so much security theater. You'd think TLS is useless, from the warning my phone gives if I connected to a public Wi-Fi AP, but then again there's nothing in TLS (or WPA) that prevents it from being used in a way that is completely useless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1si1y5lvkk
> That explains why one of my IoT vendors is using an expired certificate.
I don't think so. There was a dip in success rates for 90 minutes today, but nobody should be renewing their certificate within 90 minutes of expiration. If you're at that point, something went wrong weeks ago.
"nobody should be renewing their certificate within 90 minutes of expiration"
You obviously haven't worked with hardware guys.
"I mean, what's the point of those last 30 days if you need to renew it 30 days before expiration? Why not just renew it before it expires? If I'm required to renew it 30 days before the expiration date then the expiration date is a lie, isn't it?"
If they make 7 days grace period then expiration date will be a lie and of course every one will use grace period like it would be normal thing ;)
Roulette grace period, keep them on their toes.
> If I'm required to renew it 30 days before the expiration date then the expiration date is a lie, isn't it?
Many countries won't let you enter if your passport expires less than 6 months after your planned departure date. Basically the effective validity of a passport is 0.5 years less than the period you pay for.
> weeks ago
How long do you think a certificate lives?
Mostly 90 days, and we recommend renewing at 60 days for 90 day certs. That gives more than four weeks of leeway.
If you're one of the few early adopters of short-lived (6-day) certs you should renew at 3 days, giving you 3 days for a successful renewal. A 90 minute outage, even if it was a full outage, would not interfere with a successful renewal.
> If you're one of the few early adopters of short-lived (6-day) certs you should renew at 3 days
Apparently certificates are becoming OCSP-only with a TTL.
How's the push for 48 hour certificates going?
90 days moving to 45 but you can and should renew earlier than that. Automating this process means that you should be request a new certificates roughly 60 days (or 30 soon) after the issuance of the previous certificate. That way you would have plenty of time to deal with renewal issues. The process for renewal should have back off and retries built in. This prevents a situation where a down time for the issuer means that your production environments are non-functional.
They work at letsencrypt, I'm pretty sure they know.
> I wish Firefox would just give a mild warning for a recently expired certificate
Nope, if the SSL industry continues to insist on increasingly short cert lifetimes then I want Firefox to give no quarter when a cert expires.
Play by their rules and fall by their rules too.
Certificate expiry is less severe than an untrusted issuer or a host mismatch.
The former is most likely an administrative error (ie: someone forgot to renew, or the auto-renew is failing). The latter is more likely to be an MTM attack.
I'm not sure how you would use an expired cert as an attack vector. By loading in an old cert into an expired domain so you could spoof older content?
If a key is breached, the certificate can be revoked, but that revocation goes away once the certificate is expired.
Expiry is a pretty fundamental part of the security model of certificates.
Revocation information may not be available for expired certificates. Not that it matters much because the last time I checked revocation didn't really work for non-expired certificates either, but I think that (+ the risk of people treating expired certificates as worthless and thus increasing the risk of exposure) is the main reason.
Also of course domains changing owners, but again... I don't think we have good monitoring for that during the current long lifetime, so maybe a grace period where a warning is shown but it's easier to click through would be a good idea. Perhaps combined with a requirement to keep revocation information (and keep revoking expired certificates) X days past expiry.
CRLs mostly still work for revoking non-expired certificates. They're a bit clunky, but they don't have to be: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2025/08/crlite-fast-private-and-co...
How does that help? Seems like mostly the end user suffers.
There are reasons browsers do things the way they do.
Experience and user studies have shown that users have a hard time decoding what error messages mean. "This certificate is expired, but only for a little while" isn't meaningful for people who don't have a mental model of what a certificate is.
Furthermore, "downgrading" warnings increases the incentive to ignore issues, potentially causing more problems down the line.
But it's only the extreme warning that alerts the website (usually via a customer complaining) that the cert hasn't been renewed. Having the lesser warning just kicks the can down the road.
The IoT should have updated the certs weeks in advance. If they haven't done it by day 0 then their process is broken and delaying the scary warning to say day +5 won't solve anything.
A warning with a clear clickthrough button would work for alerting - the default TLS warnings are designed to be somewhat hard to bypass to make people think twice.
What you want is warning when certificate expiry in next 7 days, then everyone would update before the warning.
omg new tom7!
Seems not ideal for an entity who seems to be pushing for shorter expiration periods all the time
If it goes past 24 hours, that becomes a real worry.
If anyone is renewing certificates with less than a day remaining, that's an issue on their end far more than anything else.
I think it’s mostly Apple and maybe Google who have the hard-ons for the shortest expiries possible.
To be fair, if someone managed to steal a set of keys to Gmail.com and icloud.com, I would want them to expire as short a time as possible too.
That is right, but one thing is not like the other. You have always been free to set expiry low on your own certificates, but that is not the same as enforcing it on everyones ceritificate.
I think revoking them would be better in such a case.
One is not really better, you want both. Certificate revocation lists are loaded out of band and depending on the client can be poorly enforced.
Questions come up: do you block a request if you fail to download the latest CRL? How often do you refresh it?
When the cert expires, it can be removed from the CRL, so shorter lived certs will allow CRLs to be smaller and faster to transfer.
> Questions come up: do you block a request if you fail to download the latest CRL? How often do you refresh it?
In the before times we left settings like this up to competent system administrators to decide based on risk and not hardcoded by a handful of people at Google.
> competent system administrators
Sorry, we don't hire those anymore.
Best I can do is a YAML monkey who knows how to glue cloud services together..
Revoking doesn’t really work.
https://garantir.io/certificate-revocation-challenges-and-be...
Stale news. Mozilla introduced a new solution for certificate revocation that solves nearly all the problems with old methods. While it hasn't really taken off outside of Firefox, that's mostly because Google and Apple haven't embraced it because they are too busy trying to shorten certificate life unnecessarily.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2025/08/crlite-fast-private-and-co...
What is the reason that they are shortening it?
Revocation doesn't work because a cabal of arrogant Googlenos and friends decided it's too hard to fix so we won't do it at all.
The last browser where revocation worked properly is Internet Fucking Explorer.
isn't this the other way around ??? because shorter expiration time resulting on more issuing cert and therefore make it more prone to downtime
To be clear, “Degraded Performance” means just that, not “down.” Let’s Encrypt’s issuance is mostly working fine.
I have tried many times to renew my certs and have had 0 successes throughout today. It seems to be 100% degraded to me.
That’s unexpected. Please post details on the “Help” topic of the Let’s Encrypt community forum so that folks can take a look.
I see you are unfamiliar with status page-ese. “Degraded performance” is a term which means some form of “the entire datacenter is probably on fire”.
Although I only post here personally, I work for Let’s Encrypt.
Thanks you for your work!
It would be better to say this upfront. I am not blaming you in any way but this would prevent responses such as the parent's (hopefully).
Let them know that they're having an outage. If their monitors aren't telling them so, they might need to host them off-site.
Let's Encrypt is operating normally. If you're having trouble, please post the details on the community forum so that folks can help you out. There is external monitoring in place.
A common confusion; this interpretation only applies to OVH.
ref: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/millions-of-websites-o...
That would a Microsoft'ese, "Some regions are encountering issues" => "The entire world is down, but our status page is working"
I also see that fitting into the corporate language of Gaslightese.
I thought it meant "electricity has ceased to be a physical phenomenon in the general vicinity of our servers"
They claim "Degraded Performance", but 400 and 500 error responses is a non fully working service and not a performance that is just "less good".
> Some clients may encounter 400 and 500 error responses.
What % of requests succeeded vs failed? How many certificates were issued during the outage vs the average? That might actually clear things up
What are the viable alternatives to LE? And in case none exists, what does it take to build one?
Requirements: free, available to everyone, automation friendly, issues certificates that are actually considered trustworthy by other parties.
ZeroSSL – free 90-day certs via ACME, also has a web UI for cert management
Google Trust Services – free ACME certs, requires a Google account for registration
SSL.com Free DV SSL – offers free 90-day certs through ACME
I use acme.sh for certs on my personal server and was a little surprised when it started using ZeroSSL by default. Despite being more "corporate" I decided to roll with it and it's worked just fine.
acme.sh is maintained by ZeroSSL. https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh#2%EF%B8%8F%E2%83%...
Have the EU or Canada pushed to launch an analog of their own?
It seems a bit silly that a service that could be forced by EO to revoke foreign certificates is the backbone of so much of the internet.
This video explores a little on how certificate authorities were given their authority and a lot on how it can fail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1si1y5lvkk
It's a bit mathy, but if you can make it through that, I highly recommend watching the whole video, especially if you like dad jokes.
Like peers could sign sites?
> What are the viable alternatives to LE?
None. Big tech intentionally made Let's Encrypt a single point of giant failure.
> And in case none exists, what does it take to build one?
A new Internet and Web standards stack. The whole problem is self-imposed -- we could have published self-signed Ed25519 keys on the DNS instead, and the result would be more secure than whatever it is we have now.
I realize this is very much not the point, but the fact that the "Active Incident" banner is green is upsetting.
The banner's colour is based on the "Incident Status;" it's green because services are currently operational. It would be yellow or red if the impact were more severe.
Using only color to communicate the status is confusing. If you want to communicate something, it's often best to just say it. The color can be a visual reinforcement of that. Then your explanation would not be needed.
We do say it. That's what the "Incident Status" field is there for.
But that's not were the confusion is created. I don't even see the status field on mobile without scrolling. You don't have a missing status field, you have too much confusion, because the field and/or the color have a placement mismatch.
Their monitors don't seem to be detecting the outage. Sometimes they run directly on the server, and aren't able to detect routing or DNS problems.
We're operating normally, but with reduced redundancy. We continue to work with our upstream ISP to identify and resolve the issue.
It's a good thing that acme clients try to renew early, rather than leaving it to the last minute...
Let's encrypt is a single point of failure for a large percentage of the internet.
No, it's not. You can always switch to a different SSL provider. There are other free ones (as mentioned in other comments).
However, thinking about how to make your own setup more robust without having to manually change configuration when one SSL provider stops working is a good exercise. I wonder if you can just get your server's private key signed by multiple SSL providers, and serve multiple certificates to clients, and whether all browsers handle that correctly.
Nothing is a point of failure if you can switch but that's not really true unless you have fail-over.
If LE was to go nope right now, how fast could you move your stack from LE?
You can't use multiple SSL certificates as redundancy. You could probably create something bespoke with a Load Balancer and SSL offloading but that's just more overhead for really nothing.
Hot take, but in general single points of failure are less of an issue than it seems because usually outages simply aren't that common. Meanwhile maintaining whole infrastructure to avoid single point of failure is often very expensive.
thats too bad
The amount of misinformation on this site is astonishing. "Hacker News"..
You are getting down-voted for this, which I think is a bit unfair. (I expect I'll get the same.)
Although you don't expand your thesis, as a general feeling, I agree. But, to be fair, it has always been thus, and it has been this way in every forum ever.
I'm old enough to remember the irony in "I read about it on the internet so it must be true" statements, which have existed since the internet was News (NNTP) not web.
In truth, any time you get a random group of people together, of different ages and backgrounds, all of whom self-describe as "smart" you're going to get a lot of chaff mixed in with the wheat.
To some extent you need to simply ignore the nonsense. There's plenty of it and "correcting people who are wrong" is seldom received well.
:(