Cloud Computing: Expired Google certificate temporarily disrupts Gmail service

April 6, 2015 Off By David

Grazed from PCWorld. Author: Lucian Constantin.

Google forgot to renew one of its TLS certificates, leading to service disruption Saturday for people using Gmail through third-party email clients. The problem was fixed in a matter of hours, but should serve as a reminder to online service operators that keeping track of digital certificate expiration dates is important and should be planned for in advance.

Some users reported Saturday on Twitter and other sites that email clients like Microsoft Outlook and OS X Mail were displaying certificate errors when trying to send email messages through smtp.gmail.com. It seems that it wasn’t the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server’s certificate that expired, but one higher up in the chain that corresponded to Google Internet Certificate Authority G2—an intermediate certificate authority operated by Google…

Read more from the source @ http://www.pcworld.com/article/2906216/expired-google-certificate-temporarily-disrupts-gmail-service.html