Website downtime caused by certificate expiry can be both disruptive and expensive, costing enterprises between $500,000 and $5 million on average and taking over five hours to identify and remediate.
To put these costs into context, the following examples show how certificate oversights at well-known organizations led to major outages and significant business impact.
Expired certificates: A cascade of problems
a) Shopify: An expired root certificate made its way into a staging environment, risking a production deployment. Fortunately, a deployment freeze prevented it from reaching the live environment.
b) Microsoft: The expiration of the WinGet CDN’s SSL/TLS certificate impacted package installations and upgrades, affecting users’ experience and productivity.
c) Microsoft and Spotify: An expired certificate disrupted the Windows 11 Clock app’s Spotify integration, rendering it non-functional.
d) Starlink: Over several hours, Starlink experienced downtime due to an expired certificate, affecting its satellite internet services.
Widespread impact
a) Windows Insider: The expiration of a certificate resulted in the temporary unavailability of the Windows Insider program, disrupting the testing and feedback loop.
b) Spotify: An expired certificate caused a service outage on Megaphone, Spotify’s podcast platform, hindering content distribution and listener engagement.
c) LinkedIn: The expiry of a country subdomain SSL certificate impacted the accessibility and security of LinkedIn services.
Government systems and critical infrastructure
a) US Government: 80 certificates expired, leading to many US government websites being inaccessible.
How Red Sift can help
With the right solution, certificate expiry is one of the simplest problems to fix. Proactive monitoring can help organizations identify expiring certificates ahead of time, allowing them to renew or replace them before they cause disruptions. By avoiding website downtime, businesses can mitigate the financial costs associated with outages and ensure uninterrupted services for their users. Establishing robust certificate management practices is an essential part of maintaining a secure and reliable online presence in today’s digital world.
Red Sift Certificates helps organizations avoid certificate-related downtime by continuously discovering and monitoring certificates across both public and private PKI. It alerts teams to certificates approaching expiry so they can renew or replace them before they disrupt services.
Beyond first-party infrastructure, Red Sift also monitors certificates used by third-party services your sites depend on, helping surface risks introduced by external dependencies you don’t directly control. And through real-time analysis of Certificate Transparency data, Red Sift observes certificates as they are issued worldwide, automatically filtering out known, compliant certificates so teams can focus on misissuance and genuine risk.
Discover how Red Sift Certificates helps teams avoid downtime