“Expired Certificates or Credentials” – When Overlooked Expirations Bring Your App Down

The Scenario: “Everything Was Fine… Until It Wasn’t”

It’s Monday morning. You’re ready to start the week, coffee in hand, when your inbox explodes.

• “Users can’t log in!”
• “The API isn’t responding!”
• “Something is broken, please check!”

At first, there’s no obvious issue – servers are up, no deployments went out over the weekend, and resource utilization looks fine. Then you check the logs, and there it is: an SSL certificate has expired. Or maybe an API key used to authenticate with a third-party service is no longer valid. The system that was running smoothly on Friday is now failing spectacularly – because of a simple expiration date. Sound familiar? If you’ve been in DevOps, Platform Engineering, or SRE long enough, you’ve probably seen this happen.

The Quick Fix: Getting Back Online

The immediate priority is clear: restore functionality as quickly as possible.

• If an SSL certificate has expired, obtain a new one from your Certificate Authority (CA) and update your servers or load balancers.
• If an API key or other credential is no longer valid, issue a new key from the provider and update your application’s configuration accordingly.

Crisis averted. The system is back up, and users can log in again. But the bigger question remains: why did no one see this coming?

The Hidden Threat: It’s Not Just an Expired Certificate

This kind of outage isn’t just about a single oversight. It’s about how teams manage—and often fail to manage – the lifecycle of certificates and credentials. API keys, OAuth tokens, and SSL certificates all have expiration dates. And yet, many teams still rely on manual tracking – calendar reminders, spreadsheets, or best intentions. In a fast-moving environment, that’s a ticking time bomb.

The pattern is clear: it’s not a question of if a certificate will expire unnoticed, but when. And when it happens, it’s always at the worst possible moment.

The Real Fix: Automate Expiration Management

To ensure this doesn’t happen again, teams should implement:

• Automated Renewals – Renewal of certificates or credentials should happen largely automated – preferably rather often in a controlled manner to ensure everything works as expected.
• Expiration Monitoring – However, to avoid this problem in the future, it’s advisable to set up monitoring or automated alerts that notify you well in advance of any expiration.
• Continuous Testing – Automated integration tests can check whether credentials are still valid, reducing the risk of unexpected outages.

The goal is simple: turn expiration from an emergency into a routine process—one that never wakes you up on a Monday morning.

How to Make This a Non-Issue

This is exactly the kind of problem I help teams solve. If you’ve run into issues like this or want to ensure your infrastructure is resilient against credential expiration failures, let’s talk. Reach out – I’d be happy to review your setup and explore strategies that make certificate and credential management effortless.

More Info & Contact

Expired certificates or credentials can lead to unexpected outages. However, these issues can be prevented through automated renewal, monitoring, and regular testing. We’ll show you how – contact us at hello@qualityminds.de or call us at +49 911 660732011!

This blog post is part of our multi-part series, where we describe common software outages and help you resolve them quickly. You can find all other posts under Foreword: Navigating the Storms of Software Outages.