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Comment by jasonthorsness

1 day ago

Mostly this should be a non-event due to renewal long before expiration? Although huge deal I suppose for services that require issuing new certifications constantly; Let's Encrypt would be major failure mode for them.

As they move to shorter-lifetime certs (6 days now https://letsencrypt.org/2025/01/16/6-day-and-ip-certs/?utm_s...) this puts it in the realm of possibility that an incident could impact long-running services.

I encountered this while trying to issue a new certificate for a service. As a temporary fix, started using ZeroSSL which conveniently also supports the ACME protocol. While not a big problem, if you have something like `cert-manager` being used on Kubernetes, then it requires quite a bit of reconfiguration, and you may spend a couple hours trying to figure out why a certificate hasn't been issued yet.

That said, I'm unbelievably grateful for the great product (and work!) LetsEncrypt has provided for free. Hope they're able to get their infrastructure back up soon.

From the announcement:

Subscribers will be able to optin to short-lived certificates via a certificate profile mechanism being added to our ACME API.

We hope to make short-lived certificates generally available by the end of 2025.

The earliest short-lived certificates we issue may not support IP addresses, but we intend to enable IP address support by the time short-lived certificates reach general availability.