Ssl Certificate Milk

Why SSL Certificates Are Like Milk in Your Fridge

SSL certificates have expiration dates for the same reason milk does - to make sure you’re paying attention. The difference is that when milk expires, your cereal tastes funny. When certificates expire, your entire business stops working and your customers think you’ve been hacked. At Florida Blue, I watched a certificate expire on a critical service and the cascading failures looked like dominoes falling in every direction at once.

The worst part about certificate expiration is that it always happens at the worst possible time. They don’t expire during business hours on a slow Tuesday. They expire at 3 AM on Black Friday or during your vacation or right in the middle of a critical demo. It’s like they have a malevolent intelligence that waits for maximum impact. We had one certificate that expired during a fire drill, which meant half the team was standing outside while the other half was trying to figure out why the website was showing security warnings.

My favorite certificate story was when we set up auto-renewal to avoid expiration issues, but the auto-renewal script’s certificate expired. It was like hiring a security guard who locks himself out. We only discovered it when the actual certificates started expiring and the renewal script couldn’t connect to the certificate authority. Now I set calendar reminders for certificate expiration like they’re family birthdays - important enough that forgetting them will ruin your day.