Postmortem: When Expired Certificates Take Down Global Infrastructure
A technical analysis of how major companies still suffer devastating outages due to missed certificate renewals and internal monitoring gaps.
Mar 15
common.readingTime
Discover how expired certificates, misconfigured HTTPS, and domain issues affect availability and user trust — and how to prevent these incidents proactively.
A technical analysis of how major companies still suffer devastating outages due to missed certificate renewals and internal monitoring gaps.
When a private key is compromised, revocation is suppose to protect you. Explore why CRLs and OCSP fail in production environments.
Wildcard certificates are convenient but create massive blast zones. Learn how an expiring wildcard takes down dozens of subdomains simultaneously.
Automated renewals fail silently. Learn the common failure modes of ACME challenges and why you must monitor the endpoint, not the cronjob.
Learn how to isolate, diagnose, and fix missing intermediate certificates causing intermittent TLS handshake failures.
A comprehensive guide to TLS lifecycles, common expiration failures, and how to implement robust synthetic monitoring to catch certificate issues.
