Let’s Encrypt – Stopping Issuance for Potential Incident (opens in new tab)

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

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.

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

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

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

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...

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

Discord is out too right now, probably unrelated though.

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

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

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

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?

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

Unsure if related in any way.

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