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Let’s Encrypt: Stopping Issuance for Potential Incident – Resolved

This is a compliance incident, we should be issuing again shortly.

Update: Issuance is back up.

Update: Preliminary incident report:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2038351

13 hours agojaas

can you update the status page with this information?

13 hours agotheduderoger

Thanks for the assurance, jaas! Keep up the good work

13 hours agorbaudibert

> This is a compliance incident

Uh. I don't know if I like the sound of that...

13 hours agogabeio

"compliance incident" is the catchall for everything from a spelling error on a CPS (certification practice statement) or being one second late on revocation, all the way up to to key compromise.

it is almost always closer to the spelling mistake side than it is the key compromise side of the spectrum.

a peak at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=CA%20Progra... will show that most compliance issues, to the general public, are quite mundane.

13 hours agojohn_strinlai

Indeed. "Compliance" can mean some internal audit/monitoring system has tripped and requires in depth investigation and preservation of logging, or it can mean "federal law enforcement with badges are right now standing in our datacenter and/or NOC serving a court order".

13 hours agowalrus01

At times like this it's worth remembering that message boards strongly favor whatever narrative is going to be most fun and exciting to talk about.

13 hours agotptacek

I heard the CEO of Lets Encrypt, Warren Buffet, accidentally started a fire while charging his e-unicycle in the data centre and that knocked out the server that issues the certificates. They've got a backup, but it's in a safe only two people have keys to; one keyholder, Anne Hathaway, is at a parrot show in Singapore this week and her flight back is delayed due to fuel shortages. The other keyholder, Henry Kissinger, it turns out has been dead for 3 years.

13 hours agomichaelt

I sincerely hope it's the most mundane and least spectacular explanation possible, just saying from my point above that compliance has a very wide range of possible meanings and interpretations (also depending on the background/career POV of the reader), until the incident is further explained..

13 hours agowalrus01

In that sense, prepare yourself to be bored.

13 hours agojaas

Federal law enforcement in your DC isn't something you'd call a "compliance" issue, that's not what that term means. Yes it's various derivatives of the English word "comply", but this is a field of well-defined verbiage, and that ain't it. Compliance means they failed (or are being questioned) about following particular practices that they have agreed to, nothing else really.

NB: "legal compliance" is another term. So is "{legal,lawful} enforcement"

13 hours agoeqvinox

Compliance here means compliance with the CA/B Forum Baseline Requirements (and similar other policies), which cover a lot of operational obligations, from character encoding to physical security.

10 hours agoms2

Real soon now?

13 hours agowashingupliquid

That's really not good. Fortunately I'm not using any short-lived certificates like the recently announced 6 day certs, so have some breathing room. Without further details, I'd imagine anyone with a short-lived cert is getting a bit sweaty right now.

Let's Encrypt has become one of those pieces of critical Internet infrastructure that just quietly hums away in the background, the fact that they've stopped ALL issuance is deeply concerning.

13 hours agomark_round

Stopping all issuance is an pretty standard response if a CA thinks what they are issuing might be non-compliant in any way. It's an action we're required to take. It's not necessarily a sign of a more dramatic failure mode or key compromise. That said, the impact is the same for as long as the downtime lasts so it is unfortunate and we're sorry for the disruption.

I don't think the premise behind short lived (six day) certificates being viable is that CA issuance never goes down. Sure, the runway is shorter, but not that short. Most down time is a few hours or less, which is not a problem for six day certificates that should be renewed every three days.

Short lived certificates are optional though, so if it's not worth it to you there are longer lifetime options.

13 hours agojaas

> Short lived certificates are optional though, so if it's not worth it to you there are longer lifetime options.

Are they going to be optional forever, or do you plan to eventually get rid of the longer lifetime options?

2 hours agoKwpolska

Considering the open source nature of Letsencrypt, I wonder what the barriers/costs would be (theoretically) to a wealthy benefactor who wanted to duplicate its server side infrastructure and a core staffing level of persons, and fund a "parallel" equally trusted, alternative entity with a solid governing board. Same general idea how Acton funded the Signal foundation.

Somewhere that none of the physical infrastructure/hosting environment overlapped with existing Letsencrypt stuff so that the failure of one entity would have zero blast radius affecting the other.

I know there's a long and complicated process to go through to become a trusted root CA and get your CA public cert auto-installed in every OS and browser trust store. Indeed in the early days of letsencrypt I recall their root CA certs were signed by other older root CAs.

13 hours agowalrus01

A lot of Let’s Encrypt is not the software but a bunch of auditing and process that ensure compliance and make it legible to the required auditors.

13 hours agodochtman

I understand there's probably a big thorny problem of duplicating the corporate process/policies on the human level that ensure compliance, but is the back-end software pipelining stuff to CT logs not also something that can be replicated? Or is it not part of the server side stuff which has been open sourced?

https://letsencrypt.org/docs/ct-logs/

13 hours agowalrus01

Google has their own free ACME endpoint: https://pki.goog/

13 hours agocomputer23

They implied it used a GCP account. It would require to give Google personal information, a phone number, and automatic payment permission. And Google not disable your account because your spouse uploaded images for your child's doctor.

6 hours agopseudalopex

ZeroSSL should also be drop in

12 hours agonijave

ZeroSSL advertised for free 3 certificates with no multiple names or wild cards. The next plan was $180 yearly.

6 hours agopseudalopex

[dead]

13 hours agoJCTheDenthog

I just find it incredible that in 30+ years the industry hasn't adapted one bit to the brittle failure modes of certificates. I did some subcontract work with Verisign to deploy their CA infrastructure back in the early oughties and it felt like a solution was overdue way back then. I was at Google in the teensies when gmail broke due to expired SMTP certs. WAAAY overdue by then. Here we are, a decade later and it's still the same lol.

13 hours agojcims

Other than automating renewal - which we have made huge strides on - what adaption would you want to see?

13 hours agoyjftsjthsd-h

The number one thing for me would be to standardize methods to implement soft failures. Minimally in standard clients and libraries the ability to warn when certs are nearing expiration. Cert extensions to declare lifecycle expectations and possibly even warning endpoints for notification. Basically some way to empirically look at a valid cert and know something is wrong before it fails.

There are all sorts of potential privacy/security issues with any feature built in this area so it would have to be done carefully, but I think useful improvements could easily be made.

10 hours agojcims

I'd like to see better support for networks that aren't connected to the broader internet, or moving away from X.509. Note that these are contradictory. X.509 was intentionally designed to support offline verification and has a lot of elaborate ceremony to support it (like all the rest of the OSI stack). The industry just doesn't, so we get the worst of both worlds.

12 hours agoAlotOfReading

I mean, what's the alternative? I struggle to come up with a solution that doesn't boil down to the same primitive operations and trust model.

13 hours agopacketlost

>pieces of critical Internet infrastructure that just quietly hums away in the background,

And donation supported no less

13 hours agoHavoc

Wonder what incident that even could have been.

13 hours agocachius

> like the recently announced 6 day certs

Just you wait for the 1 hour and 59 minutes certs! For security!

13 hours agonottorp

There is one little-discussed down side to ever shorter-lived certificates...

13 hours agomcherm

Letsencrypt is not the only acme authority. ZeroSSL is the other popular one. There are others.

13 hours agodizhn

ZeroSSL offered for free 3 single name certificates. The next plan was $180 yearly.

Actalis offered unlimited single name certificates. Why are ZeroSSL more popular?

Google offered unlimited certificates with multiple names and wild cards. But they required a GCP account seemingly. It would require to give Google personal information, a phone number, and automatic payment permission. And Google not disable your account because your spouse uploaded images for your child's doctor.

All others I saw charged for each certificate.

6 hours agopseudalopex

Only if you’re reissuing right before expiration, which is a stupid thing to do. If you have a 47-day cert, best practice is to reissue on day 30, meaning LE would need to be down for more than two weeks before anything went wrong.

If this outage breaks your system, that’s entirely on you, not Let’s Encrypt.

13 hours agoAnalemma_

Short-lived = 6 days. Even if you reissue after 2 or 3 days, that's… not a lot of breathing room.

13 hours agoeqvinox

You have to opt in, and they are honest about the tradeoffs when discussing them:

> Short-lived certificates are opt-in and we have no plan to make them the default at this time. Subscribers that have fully automated their renewal process should be able to switch to short-lived certificates easily if they wish, but we understand that not everyone is in that position and generally comfortable with this significantly shorter lifetime. We hope that over time everyone moves to automated solutions and we can demonstrate that short-lived certificates work well.

https://letsencrypt.org/2026/01/15/6day-and-ip-general-avail...

13 hours agostriking

That's not really an answer, especially with:

> We hope that over time everyone moves to automated solutions and we can demonstrate that short-lived certificates work well.

They're expressly trying to show that this is a viable approach. It's actually kinda good that this outage, whatever it is, is happening now, as it's giving them a chance to demonstrate (or not) that they can deliver.

13 hours agoeqvinox

> no plan to make them the default at this time

At this time! Boil the frog slowly...

13 hours agonottorp

Is the frog the guy that still won't automate their certificates?

12 hours agoDylan16807

Mine are automated. Somehow it reminds me of prayer wheels though...

2 hours agonottorp

3-4 days is a ton of breathing room

13 hours agobakies

You're holding your 6-day cert wrong

13 hours agorconti

Chill, it's 2 hours. They recommend renewing at the first third of the 160 hrs.

13 hours agobakies

Thought that was the iPhone 6

13 hours agocachius

Only as long as LE isn’t down for 17 days, then we’re in big trouble.

13 hours agogbear605
[deleted]
13 hours ago

It's certainly an incident when ceasing to issue certificates... after doing absolutely everything, including limiting lifetime, to encourage their frequent renewal

13 hours agobravetraveler

Hopefully it's just a technical issue and not something like a key compromise. This could have disastrous effects considering how much of the web runs on LE certs these days.

Granted if it's configured properly everyone should have 30 days of leeway before having to issue new certs...

13 hours agokalmarv

"We have been made aware of a potential incident and are shutting down all issuance" seems to lean towards the latter and not simply a technical issue :(

13 hours agomark_round

Josh Aas is on the thread. It's a compliance issue, they expect to be issuing shortly.

13 hours agotptacek

What if they get kicked out of trusted roots because non-compliant ?

13 hours agorvnx

You don't get kicked out of trusted roots for non-compliance, you get kicked out for continuing to knowingly issue non-compliant certs, failing to revoke non-compliant certs in a timely fashion once discovered, etc.

Pausing issuance immediately upon discovery of a compliance issue is the absolute correct response so as long as they do their followup appropriately there is absolutely zero risk of being distrusted.

11 hours agowolrah

> You don't get kicked out of trusted roots for non-compliance

Of course you do, it's the main reason CAs fix compliance issues so fast.

Symantec, WoSign, Entrust, etc repeatedly had non-compliance issues and that led to them being removed (even if fixed)

Here was not a big issue: they forgot a flag to narrow the delegation of trust (but nobody knew that a few hours ago)

Still it can be very problematic, there is a quite similar situation here https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1883843

A basic non-compliance issue, just a web link missing, but huge consequences if they don’t fix it.

Repeated non-compliance (like the Symantec) will eventually get you removed even if fixed.

The core definition of losing “trust” in someone.

Keep in mind that few hours ago, nobody knew what the violation was. Turns out it was an easy fix.

10 hours agorvnx

You didn't actually respond to what the preceding comment argued. They were just pointing out the distinction between Symantec and WoSign and ordinary compliance events.

10 hours agotptacek

That's why they take incidents like this seriously and stop issuance until it's fixed. They could get kicked out of trusted roots otherwise.

13 hours agonicolas_17

Change your config to ZeroSSL or another free ACME provider?

12 hours agonijave

What makes you think that?

12 hours agoDylan16807
[deleted]
13 hours ago

Discord is out too right now, probably unrelated though.

13 hours agocedws

Just speculating, but I don't think it's unrelated. Discord heavily utilizes Cloudflare, and Cloudflare uses Let's Encrypt for a certificate issuance. If they happened to have a certificate signing dependency in some operational rollout today, I think it could explain it. Certainly the timing is very correlated.

13 hours agoaroman

I guess we'll find out but it would be surprising if they use Let's Encrypt for their backend services. The front door is issued by Google Trust Services.

13 hours agocedws

On my account they always serve Google issued certificates. There is also Let’s encrypt certificate but it is not used though. I guess that’s a fail-safe.

13 hours agowinstonwinston

Cloudflare doesn't issue let's encrypt certs

9 hours agoeverfrustrated

Just speculating

Then why post? HN is for informed discussion, not every random thought in someone's head.

Certainly the timing is very correlated.

I had chocolate ice cream for breakfast. Certainly the timing is very corrolated [sic].

13 hours agoreaperducer
[deleted]
13 hours ago

The title is misspelled. It's “Let's Encrypt”, with an apostrophe.

13 hours agoDerekL

Hopefully just a minor mississuance incident and not something more serious.

13 hours agojstyles

Issuance was stopped almost 2 hours ago: May 8, 2026 18:37 UTC.

13 hours agocroemer

in other news, Digicert's Secure Site Pro certificates are down to only $5,880.00 yearly for one wildcard domain!

13 hours agobstsb

dang I'll have to return to paid certs again?

13 hours agobaigy
[deleted]
13 hours ago

How much of the internet is going to fail because of this?

13 hours agot1234s

None, unless someone is renewing their certificates only 2 hours before they expire, which is a dumb thing to do.

13 hours agonicolas_17

It's an interesting thought experiment to consider how much of 'the internet' would still find a way to communicate with each other and fix the problem if somebody waved a magic wand and all http and https servers and clients magically disappeared worldwide instantly.

For instance some of the folks who run core BGP at medium to large sized ISPs would revert back to a few legacy IRC channels and find each other to chat and figure out WTF is going on.

"the internet" would still exist, a subset of the application layer stuff that runs on top it wouldn't...

13 hours agowalrus01

I bet we'd see a bunch of unexpected breakage in presumed-to-be-lower-level-than-http[s] infrastructure so that eg. your legacy IRC server goes down because it's running on rented hardware and the hosting provider's operations rely on some internal http services.

13 hours agoben0x539

This is extremely likely in the case of many automated provisioning, billing, and web interface control panel systems for shared hosting platforms, VPS, virtual machine service providers that likely do something https to https internally to communicate between tooling.

In my intentionally absurd theoretical scenario, what would remain up would be the bare metal in colocation in certain service providers' environments...

12 hours agowalrus01

Some other internet things going on to Discord, Cloudflare, and others.

Unsure if related in any way.

13 hours agoesseph

Here's hoping it's not another security nightmare...