Hi ,

There was/is a worldwide issue with Let's Encrypt SSL certificates and their root certificate starting on September 30th.

Let's Encrypt is a major supplier of SSL certificates; https://letsencrypt.org/about/

For Honeycomb the issue mainly applied to our email hosting, for many others it also affected their website hosting.

Email hosting clients experienced issues sending and receiving email on their phones and desktops. Email was still being received at the server and accessible via webmail. And sending via webmail was still working. Overall it was a very frustrating experience for everyone.

For some reason this issue was not well publicized and it took us a few hours and an expensive Support call to Cpanel (email control panel) to determine that this was a Let's Encrypt issue. Cpanel did not publicly acknowledge that there was an issue unless you contacted (paid) support.

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23letsencrypt

To be perfectly fair, Let's Encrypt warned Cpanel - and other major companies that their certificate root was going to expire and an updated needed to be applied - but they ignored the warning. On September 30th, all the major companies were trying to figure out how to deploy a patch or deal with millions of certificates being updated.

As of 10am October 1 - this is still an ongoing issue for some worldwide users. Based on our server logs and our own experience (our honeycombcreative.com domain was also affected), things appear to be working properly today.

If you are experiencing issues, please restart your computer/phone, and if you still having problems please call us 604-466-0558.

Although this was an issue beyond our control, our apologizes for the inconvenience.

As part of our ongoing improvements, we are in the process of setting up an 'SOS-SMS' where we send a text message to clients regarding any server impacting issues. Sending an email, when email services are down is not very useful. We will be setting up a sign-up form for clients to choose who should be notified of issues.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Stay healthy and stay safe.

Allen

Honeycomb Creative Inc.
Maple Ridge: 604 466 0558
Toll-free: 1 877 904 6622
Web: honeycombcreative.com