Let’s Encrypt has been offering website operators free SSL / TLS certificates since 2015 and is more than successful. There are currently around 116 million active certificates from the provider – this shows how popular the provider is among website owners. But now there are problems for the first time. Some of the certificates, around 3 million, may have been invalid as of today. It has been reported that an error occurred when checking the CAA records, which now leads to certificates becoming invalid.

On the night of today (Wednesday), the withdrawal of the faulty certificates began and browsers sometimes issue warnings on the affected websites. Among other things, this could lead to a decline in visitor numbers. According to reports, the Chrome browser should still not be a problem to visit the affected websites. However, it is not yet clear what exactly the effects of the faulty certificates will have.

While Let’s Encrypt is rather cautious about the problem via the blog and social media channels, all affected users were probably informed by email. The only problem is that the service can also be used without specifying an email address. So there should be a large number of webmasters who have not been informed because they have not stored any data. You can use this Tool (to check whether your own website is among the approximately 3 million. If this is the case, a new certificate should of course be used.