Probably. What matters is the community response to the outage though. From what I saw there's been a ton of love for the team working through an entire Sunday.

Is your cron, by any chance, configured to run on every first day of month at midnight?

Is this on Debian? There should be a log file created in /var/log/letsencrypt on each attempt; if you could send me one at my username @debian.org, or ping me on Freenode IRC, I may be able to help you debug. I'm guessing it's because your renew.conf's trying to use the "simple" authentication method which won't work if you've got a webserver running.

Not a solution to your problem, but if you supply an email when creating a certificate, you will receive a notification plenty in advance (three or four weeks, I think)

You're welcome to join us on https://community.letsencrypt.org/ and we can help you debug this.

I receive a mail when certs are soon expired.

I also set up traefik with auto renewal so it's a setup and forget thing now.

Try CapRover?

It does your auto renews in the background.

Hey, it might be a bug that a "real" user could encounter, if you need any kind of motivation to actually look into it!

Isn't that placing a lot of load on a free service?

i also have a daily cron. One of the renewals somehow repeatedly reissued the cert for 5 consecutive days without me noticing. For some reason the certificate was also nowhere to be found, and letsencrypt woulnd't let me manually renew the certificate because it had exceeded the limit of 5 issuances/month (or something of that sort). Thankfully the limitation is only for the exact same cert, so you can issue a new one for a slightly different set of domains without waiting for the period to pass.