There is one little-discussed down side to ever shorter-lived certificates...
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.
If this outage breaks your system, that’s entirely on you, not Let’s Encrypt.
> 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...
> 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.
At this time! Boil the frog slowly...
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.
Seriously? I don't even remember how the letsencrypt auto renew service is called. No idea how I did the initial setup either.