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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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

What you want is warning when certificate expiry in next 7 days, then everyone would update before the warning.

omg new tom7!

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.

isn't this the other way around ??? because shorter expiration time resulting on more issuing cert and therefore make it more prone to downtime

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”.

I have tried many times to renew my certs and have had 0 successes throughout today. It seems to be 100% degraded to me.

What % of requests succeeded vs failed? How many certificates were issued during the outage vs the average? That might actually clear things up

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.

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

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?

[dead]

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.