“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 Or maybe an API key used to authenticate with a third-party service is no longer valid.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• If an API key or other credential is no longer valid, issue a new key from the provider and update your application’s configuration accordingly.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.

Stay Tuned!

In the next part of this series, we will look at the “Broken Code or Configuration” scenario. It describes a situation where errors and outages occur after a new deployment change, and a quick rollback option to the last stable version helps limit the damage and analyze the root cause in a controlled environment.

More Info & Contact

Expired certificates or credentials can lead to unexpected outages, which can be prevented in the future through automated renewal, monitoring, and regular testing. We’re here to help – contact us at hello@qualityminds.de or call +49 911 660732011!

This post is part of a larger series about typical outage patterns and how to short term mitigate them while on-call. Please visit Foreword: Navigating the Storms of Software Outages | QualityMinds to find all other posts.