[Analemma_]

Only if you’re reissuing right before expiration, which is a stupid thing to do. If you have a 47-day cert, best practice is to reissue on day 30, meaning LE would need to be down for more than two weeks before anything went wrong.

If this outage breaks your system, that’s entirely on you, not Let’s Encrypt.

[eqvinox]

Short-lived = 6 days. Even if you reissue after 2 or 3 days, that's… not a lot of breathing room.

[striking]

You have to opt in, and they are honest about the tradeoffs when discussing them:

> Short-lived certificates are opt-in and we have no plan to make them the default at this time. Subscribers that have fully automated their renewal process should be able to switch to short-lived certificates easily if they wish, but we understand that not everyone is in that position and generally comfortable with this significantly shorter lifetime. We hope that over time everyone moves to automated solutions and we can demonstrate that short-lived certificates work well.

https://letsencrypt.org/2026/01/15/6day-and-ip-general-avail...

[eqvinox]

That's not really an answer, especially with:

> We hope that over time everyone moves to automated solutions and we can demonstrate that short-lived certificates work well.

They're expressly trying to show that this is a viable approach. It's actually kinda good that this outage, whatever it is, is happening now, as it's giving them a chance to demonstrate (or not) that they can deliver.

[nottorp]

> no plan to make them the default at this time

At this time! Boil the frog slowly...

[Dylan16807]

Is the frog the guy that still won't automate their certificates?

[nottorp]

Mine are automated. Somehow it reminds me of prayer wheels though...

[Dylan16807]

Forcing certificates to expire in less than a year means people don't forget how to update them, which is a big benefit.

And once people automate, short-lived certificates are a workable plan B for how to revoke certificates and have the revocation actually work.

These are both reasonable goals.

[bakies]

3-4 days is a ton of breathing room

[rconti]

You're holding your 6-day cert wrong

[bakies]

Chill, it's 2 hours. They recommend renewing at the first third of the 160 hrs.

[cachius]

Thought that was the iPhone 6

[jameshart]

Useful context: https://letsencrypt.org/2026/01/15/6day-and-ip-general-avail...

[gbear605]

Only as long as LE isn’t down for 17 days, then we’re in big trouble.