Google Let Root Certificate for Gmail Expire, Causing Email Hiccups

On Saturday Morning, One of Google's Root Certificates Expired, Causing Millions of Users' Mail Clients to Suddenly Protest. The Certificate for Google's Intermediate Certificate Authority (Google Internet Authority G2) was Used to Issue Gmail's Certificate for SMTP and the Expiration at 11:55 a.m. EDT Caused Many Email Clients to Stop Receiving Gmail Messages. While the Problem Affected Most Gmail Users Using PC and Mobile Mail Clients, Web Access to Gmail was Unaffected. Google Reported on the Company's Apps Status Page that, Engineers had been Alerted to "Issues with Gmail" at 1:21 p.m. EDT on Saturday. In a Later Status Update, a Company Spokesperson Noted that, "affected users are able to access Gmail but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior" and that "smtp.gmail.com is displaying an invalid certificate". The Root Certificate for Google's Certificate Authority was Issued by GeoTrust. By 4 p.m. EDT Saturday, the Certificate had been Updated and is Now Valid until December 2016.




Info Sources:

http://www.securityweek.com/google-lets-smtp-certificate-expire

https://pki.google.com

https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=1&iid=bf1b188b6295f21fbfc92d7b48dfe7be

https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html#hostname=smtp.gmail.com:465