SSL Certification Issue Affecting Import Tool and Confirmation Module Notifications

Summary

On September 15th, 2025, we experienced service disruptions affecting the Import Tool and Confirmation module notifications. The root cause was a misidentified SSL certificate dependency during the scheduled Azure Database for MySQL maintenance, which included the rotation of the MySQL server’s SSL certificates.

Impact

• The Import Tool was unavailable for a period of time.
• Confirmation module notifications (via SMS and email) were disrupted.
• Some other automated functions experienced degraded performance.

Root Cause

While we were aware of the scheduled SSL certificate rotation as part of Azure’s maintenance process, our evaluation process incorrectly identified which certificates were being used by certain subsystems. As a result, several services lost connectivity when the certificates were rotated.

Mitigation and Resolution

• Our engineering team corrected the certificate configuration for the affected subsystems.
• The Import Tool and Confirmation module notifications were restored to full functionality.
• Safeguards are being added to ensure that future SSL rotations do not cause similar disruptions.

Contributing Factors

At the onset of the incident, we initially believed the outages were linked to updates and fixes deployed on Thursday and Friday of the previous week. This led to rollbacks that did not address the issue. Although unrelated to the outage, some of those updates remain rolled back and will be re-published in the coming days.

Next Steps

• We are reworking our dependency system analysis to more accurately map SSL and package dependencies across all services.
• We are improving our monitoring and review processes for certificate rotations to ensure full coverage across all subsystems.
• We will re-publish rolled-back updates after additional validation.

Conclusion

We sincerely apologize for the operational problems this incident caused. We take these issues seriously and are committed to ensuring that similar outages do not reoccur in the future.