Google Public CA is down

[bathtub365]

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

[agwa]

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...

[zerocrates]

The heading above that:

"There is an ongoing incident that will force issuance to be halted."

Feels like they were alerted to some current problem severe enough that "turn it off now" was the right move. Breaking the baseline requirements somehow maybe?

[kyledrake]

People went ballistic on me a few months ago for bringing this up, but this is exactly the kind of outage that makes me really, really worried about extremely short lived certificates. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46118371

[codys]

I'm not sure I follow. This outage seems like it occurred for less than 1 day. The post you link to is about having certificates expire after 45 days. What's the connection you see?

[aaomidi]

You know there’s more than one CA?

[TwoNineFive]

Your license to website has been revoked.

[h4ch1]

Thought my Revanced patch got outdated for a second. Phew.

[ddtaylor]

Have you had to update microG yet?

[ktaraszk]

Yeah, if Heroku's cert rotation depends on Google's CA and it tried to renew during the outage window, that'd definitely cause problems. The 8-hour ETA is rough. This is why multi-CA fallback configs exist, but most platforms don't bother until they get burned by something like this. Worth checking if your apps are actually affected or if it's just the dashboard/API having issues.

[OhMeadhbh]

I worked at RSADSI when I was a kid and supported the custom spin of TIPEM Hayden and Sophia used at Verisign. This brings back some very bad memories.

But... hopefully... people created overlapping windows of cert validity so there's always a valid cert available for their services and can tolerate the CA being out of action for 8(?) hours. Imagine if your TGS/Kerberos or AWS IAM IdP was down for 8 hours.

[antonvs]

For persistent services using the affected ACME API, the window is usually 30 days.

But that didn’t stop Youtube and Youtube TV from going down hard. I imagine they’re provisioning ephemeral VMs or service instances and relying on them being able to get certs immediately, or something like that.

[TMEHpodcast]

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 failure

[14]

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 bet sure for some YouTube is a massive time sink waste of time. But I also wonder how much it has improved the knowledge, skills and ability of others. My dad often mentions how had he had YouTube when he was younger how much it would have done for him. He talks about having to go to the library and if lucky there was a book that could show you the knowledge you were looking for. He says but now you can find not just the knowledge but for example specific knowledge like car make model and year and how exactly to do job xyz. Ultimately I just can not imagine life without the wealth of knowledge YouTube has given me.

[PostOnce]

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.

[staticassertion]

I listen to multi-hour unsponsored content on Youtube almost exclusively.

[bdavbdav]

This comment sponsored by Vivo barefoot. I really do wear them myself. Honest.

[2Gkashmiri]

I watched a movie, same late night talk show host, something like "welcome night owls".

I "loved" the style but I haven't found any actual radio on the internet of that style or a podcast. Not sure about name of movie but I do remember it being in the last 10-15 years.

[kidfiji]

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

[gzread]

I am playing a YouTube video (since the time of this comment) and it has not been interrupted.

[ekr____]

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

[dijit]

youtube (recommendations/homepage) also seems down, I wonder if its relater.

[dyauspitr]

I can see all the videos and play the ones in my subscription tab though.

[sciencesama]

Not sure but it is very strange i was served a strange tom And jerry video https://youtu.be/rilFfbm7j8k

[nitinreddy88]

You can watch any YT video by directly following a link or from history/playlist etc. Its just their homepage etc is down

[rconti]

> The fix has been rolled out and the issuance flow has been undrained. We again apologize for the inconvenience.

issuance flow has been undrained?

[aaomidi]

Draining is terminology they use for draining traffic from a service.

[dilyevsky]

google sre speak

[PLenz]

Eight hour estimated restoration time!

[edwaldojunior]

Time to go over my Watch Later list

[pkulak]

Here's a direct link to the latest Veritasium. You're welcome!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMx139eTxoc

[jtokoph]

> A fix to resolve the issue will roll out in about 8 hours

oof

[catsquirrel28]

I guess it's good Google hasn't succeeded in forcing people to renew certificates every 8 hours (yet)

[bawolff]

In theory 8 hours of downtime should be fine for a CA. Obviously not ideal, but the pki system is not meant to be a live system.

[altairprime]

That feeling when you have to suspend production service until the time lock safe can be opened.

[themafia]

The same amount of time it feels like it takes for my google functions to deploy.

[tokyobreakfast]

It's a good thing we have ever-shrinking certificate lifetimes and automation never breaks. That's what I've been told, anyway.

[bigbuppo]

Yeah, this could end up as the actual root cause of The Great Oops that I've been raving about for years. And Google probably would be the right company to fuck it up in the worst way possible since Google Knows Best In All Situations.

[msie]

I was thinking about the time some software influencer said that if you are afraid to deploy on Friday then there's something wrong with you. Eff that! Murphy's Law! (allen holub - https://x.com/allenholub/status/1637111242610610182)

[jsheard]

There's at least five free ACME CAs, with failover it doesn't matter all that much if one of them falls over. If all of them fall over at once there's probably a more pressing issue like nuclear holocaust or alien invasion going on.

[rvz]

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.

[wbsun]

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 :)

[LPisGood]

I mean, with any sufficiently large project or system it’s rarely super accurate to say one person did something.

[Thaxll]

Hmm why youtube does not work but google.com does.

Now I'm wondering if you rely on OCSP in a TLS client and the pki is Google does it still works?

[arcfour]

OCSP is deprecated and basically dead at this point. Some clients still use it but I don't think many (any?) have actually enforced OCSP for years since it was notoriously fickle anyways.

[kbelder]

Interesting. If you go to youtube.com it's all messed up; missing all the videos in the listings. But if you follow a video embedded in another site to youtube, it'll show and play fine. It'll break if you try to browse away from it.

[aaronmiler]

Heroku having service issues, dependency related?

[flaxxer]

seeing heroku issues here too, had assumed it was salesforce's fault, bc of course they are eventually going to destroy heroku somehow, right?

[rolph]

https://status.pki.goog/

[spyrja]

Welp, looks like they're back up. Home page and notifications are loading just fine now.

[chiengineer]

While were all here does anyone want to launch a startup for a cloud security tool I built

[RobRivera]

Is that what was happening with my youtube mid workout?

[arduanika]

Correct. It's not youtube, it's themtube.

[Kapura]

Good thing I have nebula.tv for when youtube breaks

[benatkin]

Isn't that the thing that a bunch of YouTube creators pitch inside their channels along with VPNs and supplements? I would never consider it because the ads rub me the wrong way. Or is it some alternative frontend for YouTube that happens to have a similar sounding name?

[1970-01-01]

Did someone buy the google.com domain again?

[Shellban]

I have the domain. If you want you cat videos back, you are going to have to pay me:

ONE MILLION DOLLARS!

[lawgimenez]

Down here in Southeast Asia

[microm]

All is down in eu too

[philprx]

Trust is down ;-)

[manupati]

Still down

[ktaraszk]

The CA outage is hitting a lot of services, but yeah, Heroku's been on a slow decline since the Salesforce acquisition. Free tier killed, pricing creep, stagnant innovation. Even when it's not their fault, you start wondering if it's worth the risk of being on a platform that feels like it's in maintenance mode.