This outage mainly effected the certificate generation and renewal. People who wanted to renew an existing/expired SSL cert or wanted to generate a new SSL cert weren't able to do it during this window. However, I believe the impact was small enough.
SSL certs don't need any external service for verification. The clients (in this case your browser) would have a set of root certificates issues by many CAs which serve as way for verifying.
The impact wasn't huge as most people who do renewal had a one time failure in the cron jobs which renew the certs. And since the renewals are tried 1 month before cert expiry, this was a non issue.
Yeah. The common advise is to have an automated setup for renewals so you don't have to worry about it. It is also very trivial. Just add `@weekly letsencrypt renew` to your cron job and you are done.
I know that it should be trivial. But on my local/vps servers the cron jobs would not execute. I wasn't sure why... on my raspberry pi however they executed as expected.
edit: it's possible it's a root problem, as Raspberry Pi I don't believe can be root. I know I'm bad using root user.
SSL certs don't need any external service for verification. The clients (in this case your browser) would have a set of root certificates issues by many CAs which serve as way for verifying.
The impact wasn't huge as most people who do renewal had a one time failure in the cron jobs which renew the certs. And since the renewals are tried 1 month before cert expiry, this was a non issue.