Is Let's Encrypt Down?

No — Let's Encrypt is up

Let's Encrypt's status page: Operational · read 4 hours ago, too long ago to count
FlareWarden checks: Website reachable · 8 of 8 regions · 435 ms

Right now

The verdict is the worse of these two. How we decide

Let's Encrypt's status page

letsencrypt.status.io · read 3 hours ago · too long ago to set the verdict

Operational

Let's Encrypt's components, as its status page reports them
Component	Status
High Assurance Datacenter 1	Operational
High Assurance Datacenter 2	Operational
High Assurance Datacenter 1	Operational
High Assurance Datacenter 1	Operational
High Assurance Datacenter 2	Operational
High Assurance Datacenter 1	Operational
Public Data Center	Operational
Public Data Center	Operational
Public Data Center	Operational
Public Data Center	Operational
Public Data Center	Operational
Public Data Center	Operational

Open their status page

FlareWarden checks

letsencrypt.org from 8 regions · when you open this page (at most every 30 minutes), otherwise every 6 hours

Reachable

Regions up: 8 of 8
Response: 435 ms
Checked: 3 hours ago

By region

Ashburn reachable, 48 ms
Dallas reachable, 326 ms
Frankfurt reachable, 61 ms
Johannesburg reachable, 2269 ms
London reachable, 123 ms
Los Angeles reachable, 198 ms
Newark reachable, 99 ms
São Paulo reachable, 357 ms

Timing by region

Connection timing for each region that loaded the page
Region	DNS	TCP	TLS	TTFB
Ashburn	27 ms	2 ms	8 ms	42 ms
Dallas	142 ms	30 ms	33 ms	238 ms
Frankfurt	39 ms	3 ms	7 ms	55 ms
Johannesburg	207 ms	43 ms	347 ms	1242 ms
London	23 ms	16 ms	21 ms	78 ms
Los Angeles	125 ms	11 ms	17 ms	166 ms
Newark	47 ms	8 ms	13 ms	77 ms
São Paulo	335 ms	2 ms	8 ms	349 ms

We check that letsencrypt.org loads, not every feature behind it. Test it yourself

History

Incidents Let's Encrypt reported

from letsencrypt.status.io

We don't have Let's Encrypt's incident history yet.

Let's Encrypt website availability

Measured by FlareWarden · letsencrypt.org

Last 7 days: 100%
Last 30 days: 100%
Last 90 days: 100%
Avg response, 30 days: 303ms

Last 30 days

64-day clean streak

Sep 25 Today

No downtime Partial Downtime Not measurable No data

Measured by FlareWarden's own checks of letsencrypt.org from multiple regions every 6 hours. Let's Encrypt's status page sets the verdict above when it reports trouble, but never these figures. Percentages count only checks that returned an availability answer — 64 days measured so far. A dash means that window does not yet hold enough measured days to publish a figure.

What Let's Encrypt does

Let's Encrypt is a nonprofit certificate authority that issues free TLS certificates through the ACME protocol. Certbot and similar clients request and renew them automatically, without anyone buying a certificate by hand. Default certificates are valid for 90 days, with an opt-in six-day option, so renewal is a continuous background job rather than an annual purchase.

What an outage looks like

Existing sites keep serving HTTPS normally; what breaks is issuance. Renewal jobs fail with ACME errors against acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org, new certificates cannot be obtained, and automated deployments that request a certificate on first boot stall. The visible damage arrives later, when a certificate that could not renew reaches its expiry and browsers start showing warnings.

What to do about it

Nothing urgent if your certificates are current: Let's Encrypt advises renewing at 60 days on a 90-day certificate, which leaves a month of slack for exactly this. Check letsencrypt.status.io, which lists the production and staging ACME endpoints separately from the website and the certificate transparency logs. Let the client retry on its own schedule rather than hammering the API.

Is it down for everyone, or just you?

If this page says Let's Encrypt is up but it is not loading for you, the problem is between you and them. Run a check against any URL from up to 17 cities across three regions to find out where it breaks.

Test it yourself

Related services

Let's Encrypt outage FAQ

Will my HTTPS site break if Let's Encrypt is down?

No, not while your current certificate is valid. A certificate is a file your own server presents, and the browser verifies it against a root without contacting Let's Encrypt. An outage stops new issuance and renewal. The risk falls only on sites whose certificate expires during the window, which is why the recommended renewal at 60 days of 90 exists.

Does an outage affect revocation checking for visitors?

No. Let's Encrypt turned off its OCSP responder on August 6, 2025 and now publishes revocation information exclusively through Certificate Revocation Lists. That removed a live per-request dependency on Let's Encrypt from the browsing path, so a service incident today has no effect on visitors reaching sites that use its certificates.

My renewal failed once. Should I retry immediately?

No. Let's Encrypt asks that ACME clients renew at random times rather than in a synchronised rush, and repeated retries during an incident add to the load that is already the problem. Certbot and most clients back off on their own. With renewal at 60 days on a 90-day certificate, one failure has a month of headroom before it matters.

How do I tell a Let's Encrypt outage from a problem with my own setup?

Check the staging endpoint. letsencrypt.status.io lists acme-staging-v02 separately from production, and both are usually reported together during a real incident. If both are operational, the cause is more likely local: a firewall blocking the HTTP-01 challenge, a DNS record that has not propagated, or a rate limit your account has hit.

How we measure this

We request Let's Encrypt's public endpoint every 6 hours from Fly.io regions across six continents — the most recent check ran from 8 of them. When you open this page and our last check is more than 30 minutes old, we check again on the spot; those checks update the verdict, never the availability figures.
A region counts as down only when it gets no usable HTTP response. A 403 or 429 means the origin answered and refused us, which we report as blocked, never as an outage.
A single failing region is treated as probe noise. Our checks only change their verdict when two consecutive cycles agree.
Response times average only the regions that actually served the page, so a timeout never inflates the number.
Where Let's Encrypt publishes an official status feed we read it too, and the verdict is the worse of what it reports and what our checks see: a major outage of Let's Encrypt itself is Down, trouble with one part of it is Degraded, problems at a few of a provider's many locations change nothing, and a security notice that marks nothing down is shown but changes nothing either. A reading counts for 45 minutes; we read the feed again within minutes of any change to its incidents. The availability figures above are our measurement alone.

Get alerted when Let's Encrypt goes down

We check Let's Encrypt every 6 hours, and again when you open this page if that was more than 30 minutes ago. Your own monitors run as often as every 30 seconds, from up to 17 cities across three regions, and tell you the moment something breaks.

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