Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Public CA is down

status.pki.goog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 166 posts

Re: Google Public CA is down

#81

Post by PostOnce »

TMEHpodcast wrote: post #43

It is a well-known fact that the moment YouTube goes down, the collective productivity of Earth increases by approximately 4,000%, which is immediately squandered by everyone going to Hacker News to read comments about YouTube being down. I myself have taken to podcasts… an ancient medium in which people simply talk at you for ninety minutes without a single sponsorship for a mobile game, and this is considered a fai…

They've begun injecting obnoxious ads into the downloadable mp3s on a lot of podcasts I've found. Hyperlocal ads for tire shops and bakeries.

I don't want to buy tires, I want to learn about ______. The ads don't even make sense because they're irrelevant.

Re: Google Public CA is down

#82

Post by nickysielicki »

agwa wrote: post #76
bathtub365 wrote: post #53

The status history on the page makes it seem like this was intentional? > 17 Feb 2026 11:32 PST A rollout is going to prevent issuance from occurring. We will provide an estimate on when issuance will stop. > 17 Feb 2026 12:14 PST Issuance is beginning to stop. A fix to resolve the issue will roll out in about 8 hours

This usually indicates that the CA was issuing non-compliant certificates and needed to prevent further non-compliance. Will be interesting to watch Bugzilla for the incident report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=CA%20Progra...

What qualifies as a non-compliant certificate?

Re: Google Public CA is down

#83

Post by wbsun »

rvz wrote: post #18

Everyone loves to say they work at $FAMOUS_COMPANY, but when something like this happens, no-one will say that they did this. Looking forward to the post-mortem.

Oh I am more than happy to tell people how I took down entire Google Cloud 11 years ago. I mean, of course to the level of details Google is comfortable with to share externally :)

Re: Google Public CA is down

#84

Post by agwa »

nickysielicki wrote: post #82
agwa wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This usually indicates that the CA was issuing non-compliant certificates and needed to prevent further non-compliance. Will be interesting to watch Bugzilla for the incident report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=CA%20Progra...

What qualifies as a non-compliant certificate?

It doesn't comply with one or more root store policies (which all incorporate the Baseline Requirements by reference, which incorporate various specs, such as RFC5280, by reference).

Mozilla root store policy: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/secu...

Chrome root store policy: https://googlechrome.github.io/chromerootprogram/

Apple root store policy: https://www.apple.com/certificateauthority/ca_program.html

Baseline Requirements: https://github.com/cabforum/servercert/blob/main/docs/BR.md

There are countless examples of non-compliant certificates documented in the Bugzilla component I linked above. A recent example: a certificate which was backdated by more than 48 hours, in violation of section 7.1.2.7 of the Baseline Requirements: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2016672

Re: Google Public CA is down

#85

Post by marcosdumay »

TMEHpodcast wrote: post #67
14 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well one must also argue the opposite. I myself have gained immense knowledge from YouTube. I have learned things like phone screen replacements or phone battery replacements. I call myself a mechanic from the school of YouTube and have saved myself at minimum $10k in repairs doing the work myself. I have learned to make endless food recipes or create things like giant bubbles or slime for my kids. My point is that I…

Congratulations! You’ve successfully avoided YouTube Shorts.

Personally, I just scroll through them. They break the feed into well defined "chapters" at the end of what I can decide to look into the next one or go somewhere else because there's nothing good there today.

Also there's this woman that makes very funny shorts about software development and good long videos that aren't as good. I look for her shorts too.

Re: Google Public CA is down

#86

Post by thayne »

ekr____ wrote: post #7
kidfiji wrote: post #3

Ah, so that’s probably why YouTube is also down (at the time of this comment)

Perhaps the same underlying cause, but there's no reason why Google's public CA being temporarily down would bring YouTube down.

It could prevent Google from rotating in new instances, because they aren't able to obtain a certificate.

Although, if that is the case, I would expect to to impact basically every google site.

Re: Google Public CA is down

#87

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Arainach wrote: post #64
bigbuppo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's inevitable that one of the major cloud providers will irrecoverably delete all customer data with one single fat-fingered command. Though in google's case I'll also consider the prophecy to be fulfilled if they delete their own data. It will forever be known as The Great Oops.

It's not inevitable, it's essentially impossible. There are a few things that can cause tremendously widespread outages , essentially all of them network configuration changes. Actually deleting customer data is dramatically more difficult to the point of impossible - there are so many different services in so many different locations with so many layers of access control. There is no "one command" that can do such a…

Ah, but you fail to account for Google's incredible knack for building tools designed to do things at scale. Or put AI in things that don't need it.

The possibility Google will either manage to unleash a malicious AI on their infrastructure and/or develop a way to destroy a lot of data at scale quite efficiently or some combination of the two is far from zero.

Bear in mind, this "Little Oops" should also have been impossible: https://www.techspot.com/news/103207-google-reveals-how-blan...

Re: Google Public CA is down

#88

Post by JyB »

bigbuppo wrote: post #45
LPisGood wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell me more about The Great Oops

It's inevitable that one of the major cloud providers will irrecoverably delete all customer data with one single fat-fingered command. Though in google's case I'll also consider the prophecy to be fulfilled if they delete their own data. It will forever be known as The Great Oops.

I don’t know if you’re being serious but that’s laughable

Re: Google Public CA is down

#89

Post by thayne »

jsheard wrote: post #62
tokyobreakfast wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many servers are set up with CA redundancy? I've yet to see one let alone hear of this practice.

For one, Cloudflare uses four different CAs almost interchangeably. Caddy also makes it easy to configure ACME failover if you're self-hosting, and defaults to using two different CAs if you don't specify any. Frankly even with no CA redundancy, downtime would have to drag on for weeks to actually disrupt renewals. ACME certs usually get rotated after about 2/3rds of their duration has expired, so the upcoming 45 day…

They aren't all drop in replacements for each other though. For example, Let's Encrypt offers free wildcard certs (with dns verification), but for ZeroSSL, it requires a paid subscription.

Re: Google Public CA is down

#90

Post by com2kid »

TMEHpodcast wrote: post #67
14 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well one must also argue the opposite. I myself have gained immense knowledge from YouTube. I have learned things like phone screen replacements or phone battery replacements. I call myself a mechanic from the school of YouTube and have saved myself at minimum $10k in repairs doing the work myself. I have learned to make endless food recipes or create things like giant bubbles or slime for my kids. My point is that I…

Congratulations! You’ve successfully avoided YouTube Shorts.

YT shorts are up to 3 minutes now.

At this point it is just YT Vertical Videos.

Post reply on HN