Let’s Encrypt: Stopping Issuance for Potential Incident – Resolved | Hacker News Reader

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

letsencrypt.status.io

144 pointsrbaudibert91 comments

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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

> This is a compliance incident

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

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".

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.

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..

In that sense, prepare yourself to be bored.

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.

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"

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.

"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.

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

Real soon now?

can you update the status page with this information?

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.

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.

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.

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/

Our code for sending stuff to CT logs is fully open source. But that's the tiniest slice of our compliance regime -- the vast majority of it is things like audit logging certain events, preserving audit logs in specific ways for certain amounts of time, ensuring dual-controls on all systems, being both audited and penetration tested annually, maintaining firewalls and vulnerability scanning tools, etc.

It's absolutely possible to spin up another new CA; lots of folks have done so over the years. But having time, and money, and prior experience all help a lot.

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

ZeroSSL should also be drop in

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

Their docs say unlimited free and wildcards are supported with ACME. Does require EAB tho

https://zerossl.com/documentation/acme/

Fwiw haven't used them personally

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.

Wonder what incident that even could have been.

The NSA needed some certs to expire, so you can send plain text. Just to test it. They already have access to the CA, but, if it works easier, why not. /s

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

And donation supported no less

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

Ask the CA/Browser forum what they will insist upon

> like the recently announced 6 day certs

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

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

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.

You're holding your 6-day cert wrong

Thought that was the iPhone 6

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

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

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

3-4 days is a ton of breathing room

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...

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.

> no plan to make them the default at this time

At this time! Boil the frog slowly...

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

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

Forcing certificates to expire in less than a year means people don't forget how to update them, which is a big benefit.

And once people automate, short-lived certificates are a workable plan B for how to revoke certificates and have the revocation actually work.

These are both reasonable goals.

> people don't forget how to update them

Seriously? I don't even remember how the letsencrypt auto renew service is called. No idea how I did the initial setup either.

Yes, seriously. Forgetting how to set up the automation is a different and significantly smaller issue.

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

If you're using ACME to handle certificate rotation, can't you just configure multiple providers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48071607

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

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.

It's popular because Caddy uses it. I am not sure if it's default or just an option though.

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

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...

"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 :(

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

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

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.

Change your config to ZeroSSL or another free ACME provider?

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.

> 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.

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.

What makes you think that?

They had scheduled maintenance a few hours ago, https://letsencrypt.status.io/pages/maintenance/55957a99e800...

Related Cloudflare issue: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/z3vgxxfvt3yb

Discord is out too right now, probably unrelated though.

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.

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.

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].

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.

In Cloudflare Enterprise you can pick either or leave it on auto. Iirc there's a 3rd option but I don't know if it's still supported (Terraform and SDKs used to have it in the enum)

https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/reference/certificate-...

Cloudflare doesn't issue let's encrypt certs

For domains where they handle the certificates, Cloudflare utilizes multiple CAs, to avoid such a single point of failure: I’ve seen Cloudflare managed certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt, Google Cloud, Sectigo, and SSL.com.

Cloudflare does provide the option for customers to manage their own certificates, which would make it the customer’s responsibility to have alternatives issuers when needed.

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

Unsure if related in any way.

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

It's fixed now. Thanks!

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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.

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...

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

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

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