GitHub home page disabled after apparent SSL failure

GitHub's homepage was down earlier this week, with reports that an expired SSL certificate was to blame.

GitHub users reported being unable to access several resources, apparently because the SSL certificate issued on GitHub's content delivery network (CDN) was only valid until November 2, 2020 at 7:00 am ET.

Technically, the issue is known as a “mixed content issue” because GitHub’s back-end server had a valid certificate, which meant that certain aspects of the site, such as textual content, continued to function correctly. However, anything accessed from the standalone CDN server failed to load, including images and JavaScript files.

The outage lasted for approximately 30 minutes before GitHub managed to acquire a new SSL certificate. The new certificate will expire in November 2021.

Expired certificate

Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, certificates are a commonly used security protocol that informs online users that communication between their web browser and a web server is encrypted. As a visual clue that a valid SSL certificate exists, Internet users should see a padlock next to any HTTPS URL that uses SSL.

Despite the importance of having a valid SSL certificate, a surprising number of online outlets forget to renew it, leading to embarrassing outages. Lately, HP and Roku users have encountered issues due to unforeseen certification problems.

Most of the time, these issues are easily avoided with good advance planning. To avoid future problems, someone at GitHub should set a reminder now to renew the SSL certificate before it expires next year.

Through a standby computer