Was the root cause of the O2 outage really an expired certificate?
Why wasn't the "root cause" any of these?
- Certificate expiration not monitored
- Certificate renewal process complex so that everyone hopes someone else fixes it
- Certificate renewal is so rare, we aren't good at doing it
- Deploying new certificates manual and error-prone
- Vendor did not document all periodic maintenance requirements
- Soon-to-expire certs not logged
- Logging for each component an island onto itself
The reason, dear reader, is that there is no such thing as a single "root cause". There are only contributing factors.
When will the industry learn?
