Expired security certificate caused Gmail to wig out
Procrastinating kids trying to email the Easter Bunny on Saturday using their Gmail account may have run into some trouble getting their messages sent. That's because a "majority" of Gmail users, or hundreds of millions, were affected by a problem that Google later identified as an expired security certificate on the server that's responsible for handling outbound Gmail messages.
"We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior," Google noted in a service update. "We will provide an update by 4/4/15, 3:00 PM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change. smtp.gmail.com is displaying an invalid certificate."
Authority G2, which is Google's in-house certificate issuer, sent a valid certificate around three hours after the trouble began, fully restoring service by 3:46 PM on Saturday.
The timing of the outage initially raised eyebrows, as it came only a few days after Google and Mozilla both started blacklisting China's main domain name registry and certificate authority, China Internet Information Center (CNNIC), ZDNet reports. Google made the decision after the CNNIC handed out a certificate that could allow a hacker to impersonate a Google site.
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