StartSSL Is Down Hard Due To Cut Optical Lines

At my day job today one of the developers asked me to renew the SSL certificate on one of their QA servers. For that particular server we were using a free StartSSL certificate.

No problem right? just go to StartSSL.com and request a new cert. Ummm, not so much. The site just wouldn't come up for me. I even checked Is It Down Right Now, and here was the result:

Great, so it is really down and not just me. I decided to hit up Twitter to see if there was an explanation. Sure enough! Here was their tweet:

Yep, confirmed! They were down hard and it was because of cut optic lines! Other tweets later asked customers to try again tomorrow, and hopefully everything will be back up.

Many customers had issues because Firefox was not able to lookup the revocation information due to the outage.

Long story short, you have two options at this point, you can wait and hope they come back up or you can spent about $8 and just get a cert from Comodo here: (Comodo Positive SSL)

Are you a StartSSL user? Did you notice the downtime today? How did it affect you? Let us know in the comments!

Related articles

• Running ypour own XMPP server on Debian or Ubuntu
• One link/area on a https site with a different SSL config?
• Twitter now requires encrypted API communication
• Strong SSL/TLS Cryptography in Apache and Nginx