SSL Certificate Expiration: The Hidden Risk

Picture this: It’s a Tuesday afternoon. Your development team is heads-down on a new feature launch. Suddenly, your support inbox explodes. Customers are reporting scary browser warnings. “Your connection is not private.” “This site may be trying to steal your information.”

Your website is technically online. Your servers are running fine. But to every visitor, your business looks like a phishing scam.

The culprit? An SSL certificate that expired 47 minutes ago while everyone was focused on other priorities.

This isn’t a hypothetical scenario. It happens to businesses of all sizes - including some of the largest companies in the world.

The Scope of the Problem

Here’s a statistic that should concern every business owner: according to Keyfactor’s 2024 PKI and Digital Trust Report, 88% of companies continue to experience unplanned outages due to expired certificates.

Not small companies. Not companies without IT departments. Eighty-eight percent of all companies.

The same research found that organizations experienced an average of more than 3 certificate-related outages within a two-year period. And 40% of respondents indicated a high likelihood of future outages.

Meanwhile, CSC’s 2025 research reveals that 40% of enterprises are at risk of unexpected service outages caused by out-of-date SSL certificates.

The uncomfortable truth? Certificate expiration is one of the leading causes of website downtime, and it’s almost always preventable.

When Giants Fall: Real-World SSL Disasters

If you think this only happens to small businesses without proper IT infrastructure, consider these incidents:

Ericsson: 32 Million People Lose Service

In 2018, telecommunications giant Ericsson - a company handling approximately 40% of global mobile traffic - experienced a massive outage due to an expired SSL certificate. The impact was staggering:

• 32 million customers across 11 countries lost 4G and SMS signals
• The outage caused a nationwide failure of the O2 mobile network in the UK
• Ericsson faced $1.4 billion in remediation costs, including legal settlements, fines, and security upgrades
• The company’s stock dropped 33%

All because a single certificate was allowed to expire.

Epic Games: 5.5 Hours of Gaming Chaos

On April 6, 2021, a wildcard TLS certificate expired at Epic Games, taking down some of the most popular games in the world:

• Fortnite, Rocket League, and the Epic Games Store went offline
• The certificate was deployed across hundreds of backend services
• 25 people were directly engaged in recovery, with additional support across multiple departments
• Total recovery time: approximately 5.5 hours
• The expired certificate was discovered 12 minutes after expiration, but the damage was already spreading

The root cause? The certificate covered internal service communication that lacked active monitoring, and automated renewals weren’t enabled.

Microsoft Teams: 20 Million Users Stranded

On February 3, 2019, Microsoft Teams experienced a three-hour outage that left 20 million daily users unable to access the collaboration platform. The cause? An expired authentication certificate.

For businesses that had moved their communications to Teams, three hours meant missed meetings, delayed decisions, and frustrated employees.

More High-Profile Failures

The list of certificate-related outages reads like a who’s who of tech giants:

Sources: Encryption Consulting, Keyfactor

The Most Damaging Discovery: Equifax

Perhaps the most sobering case is Equifax. After their infamous 2017 data breach, investigators discovered that an SSL certificate on an internal monitoring device had been expired for 19 months. This lapse prevented the detection of 265 instances of unauthorized data access.

They also found 324 other expired SSL certificates across their infrastructure.

The lesson? Expired certificates don’t just cause outages - they create security blind spots that can mask much larger problems.

The Browser Warning Death Spiral

When your SSL certificate expires, browsers don’t quietly let visitors through. They actively block access with alarming warnings:

• Chrome: “Your connection is not private - Attackers might be trying to steal your information”
• Firefox: “Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead”
• Safari: “This Connection Is Not Private”

The impact on user behavior is immediate and severe.

According to WebsitePulse research, almost 90% of customers stop the transaction process after getting an SSL expiry warning, with about 72% terminating the transaction immediately.

Since July 2018, Chrome has labeled any non-HTTPS site as “Not Secure”. When customers see that warning, trust evaporates instantly. Research from BigCommerce shows that 85% of shoppers will abandon or avoid sites displaying security warnings altogether.

For an e-commerce business, this isn’t just lost traffic - it’s lost customers who may never return.

The Hidden Costs Beyond Lost Sales

Direct revenue loss from blocked visitors is just the beginning. Here’s what most businesses don’t account for:

1. SEO Damage

Google has used HTTPS as a ranking signal since 2014. While it’s considered a “lightweight” factor, an expired certificate creates a cascade of problems:

• Googlebot can’t crawl your HTTPS pages properly
• Your site may be temporarily de-indexed
• Recovery can take weeks even after the certificate is renewed
• Competitors gain ground while your organic traffic drops

2. Compliance Violations

Regulations like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR require secure encryption. An expired SSL certificate can trigger compliance violations, leading to:

• Regulatory fines
• Failed audits
• Potential legal liability
• Loss of payment processing capabilities

3. Emergency Response Costs

When a certificate expires unexpectedly, everything else stops. According to industry analysis, recovering from a certificate outage can cost enterprises an average of $15 million when accounting for:

• Emergency IT response (often at premium rates)
• Lost productivity across all affected departments
• Customer service surge handling complaints
• Expedited certificate procurement and deployment
• Post-incident analysis and prevention measures

4. Reputational Damage

In the age of social media, screenshots of your security warning will circulate long after the certificate is renewed. Customer trust, once broken, takes months or years to rebuild.

Why This Keeps Happening

If the consequences are so severe, why do certificates keep expiring? The reality is that certificate management is deceptively difficult:

The Inventory Problem

According to Keyfactor, only 36% of companies use dedicated certificate lifecycle management solutions. The rest rely on spreadsheets, calendar reminders, or hoping someone remembers.

Even more concerning: 53% of organizations cannot precisely quantify their keys and certificates inventory. You can’t manage what you can’t see.

The Sprawl Problem

Modern businesses don’t have one certificate - they have dozens or hundreds across:

• Public-facing websites
• Internal applications
• API endpoints
• Load balancers
• Email servers
• VPN infrastructure
• IoT devices
• Development and staging environments

Each certificate has its own expiration date, and they’re rarely synchronized.

The Handoff Problem

The person who installed a certificate three years ago may have left the company. The documentation might be incomplete. The renewal emails might be going to an inbox no one monitors.

The Shorter Lifespan Problem

Making matters worse, certificate validity periods are shrinking. Certificates that once lasted 5 years, then 2 years, are now capped at 398 days.

And it’s about to get much more challenging: in April 2025, the CA/Browser Forum approved changes that will reduce maximum certificate validity to just 47 days by 2029.

Manual certificate management simply won’t scale under this new model.

What Smart Businesses Do Differently

The organizations that avoid certificate disasters share common practices:

1. Complete Visibility

You need to know every certificate in your infrastructure - not just the obvious ones on your main website. This includes:

• All subdomains and wildcard certificates
• Internal services and APIs
• Third-party integrations
• Cloud infrastructure
• Development environments

2. External Monitoring

Internal monitoring tools often can’t detect certificate problems the way your customers experience them. External monitoring from multiple geographic locations catches issues like:

• Regional certificate propagation delays
• CDN configuration problems
• Mixed content warnings
• Certificate chain issues

3. Proactive Alerting

Knowing a certificate expired yesterday is useless. Knowing one expires in 30 days gives you time to act. Smart businesses set multiple warning thresholds:

• 60 days: Initial notification
• 30 days: Escalated warning
• 14 days: Urgent alert
• 7 days: Critical - all hands on deck

4. Automated Renewal Where Possible

Let’s Encrypt and similar services offer automated certificate renewal. For certificates that can’t be automated, documented procedures and clear ownership prevent the “I thought someone else was handling it” problem.

5. Regular Audits

Quarterly certificate audits catch the certificates that slip through the cracks - the staging server someone spun up, the legacy system no one maintains, the acquired company’s infrastructure that was never fully integrated.

The Bottom Line

An SSL certificate costs a few dollars to a few hundred dollars per year. An SSL certificate outage can cost millions.

The businesses that thrive aren’t the ones that never have certificate problems - they’re the ones that detect problems before customers do and have processes in place to prevent recurrence.

The question isn’t whether one of your certificates will eventually expire unexpectedly. The question is whether you’ll find out from your monitoring system or from your customers.

Want to ensure you never miss an expiring SSL certificate? FlareWarden monitors your SSL certificates across all your domains and alerts you well before expiration - so you can renew on your schedule, not in a panic.