Pokémon GO was unavailable for 27 minutes due to an expired SSL certificate

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Roughly 8 hours ago, Pokémon GO went down in various regions of the world and the game was unavailable for approximately 27 minutes.

The game didn’t go down because of an update or because of a planned maintenance. The game was unavailable because Niantic forgot to renew their SSL certificate on the release environment, which resulted in faulty login attempts, network errors and decreased service availability.

As noticed by the Pokémon GO development Discord, the release environment’s certificate has expired on January 21st, making it impossible for the game to perform network requests:

Uh oh, SSL certificate expired on release
“Uh oh, SSL certificate expired on release” taken from a different angle

One could say that this is a major blunder for Niantic, or for any other large gaming company. We don’t agree. SSL certificates are usually a pain in the neck to maintain, they often get overlooked and taken for granted.

In all honesty, probably everyone in the software industry had forgotten to renew their SSL certificate at least once, us included. Seeing that Niantic has the same problems as the rest of the world, doesn’t make us angry — it makes us chuckle 🙂

In any case, the game is now up and running and you should be able to farm raids again. We’re expecting another wave of EX invites today, so stay tuned for more news.

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Zeroghan
Zeroghanhttps://pokemongohub.net/
Zeroghan started the Hub in July 2016 and hasn't had much sleep since. A lover of all things Pokémon, web development, and writing.

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