[May 30, 2020]
On 30th of May 2020, at around 10:50 AM (UTC), our system has started detecting an unusually high number of downtimes, and upon further investigation, we’ve discovered that quite a lot of the monitored websites were having SSL issues.
This was caused due to the ADDTrust Root Certificate expiring and in turn invalidating a lot of SSL Certificate Chains. This means that if your website’s SSL Certificate has this Root Certificate in it’s chain, then some of your website users may experience SSL issues when trying to access your website.
The is what the issue looks like when checking your website on an online SSL checker:
Our platform has picked up on this SSL issue and has dispatched downtime alerts to every affected website, that has “Verify SSL Certificate” enabled in their Uptime Monitor settings.
Even though our SSL Verification system has done its job perfectly, detecting a problem in the SSL Certificate Chain, considering that this issue is very widespread we’ve decided to disable SSL Verification for the affected Uptime Monitors, in order to allow the affected users to update their SSL Certificate Bundles without having a big downtime stain in their Uptime Reports due to this issue.
All of the affected users had already received downtime notifications regarding this issues, from our Uptime Monitoring system, so they should be aware of the problem. However, we will also be sending an announcement email to all of these users, explaining the matter, and how they can fix it.
How can you know if you’ve been affected?
- Did you receive any downtime notifications about your Website Uptime Monitor(s) on the 30 May 2020 between 10:50 AM (UTC) and 11:30 AM (UTC)?
- When checking your Location Fail Log are you seeing the following errors starting with 30 May 2020?
SSL certificate problem: certificate has expired - If any of the above two conditions are fulfilled then you are probably affected.
- You should also check your website on SSLShopper to confirm whether or not you are having any SSL Chain issues.
What can you do to fix the issue?
You should update your SSL Certificate Bundle, with a new one that doesn’t contain this expired root certificate.
Once you’ve updated your SSL Certificate Bundle, you can re-enable SSL Verification from your Uptime Monitor’s settings (under advanced settings), as explained here:
https://docs.hetrixtools.com/how-to-enable-ssl-verification-for-your-uptime-monitor/
If you need further assistance be sure to open a support ticket on our website.