Microsoft Forgets to Update TLS Certificate Again, Causing Website to Fail to Load Properly Over 25 Days Past Expiry

For major tech companies, managing TLS certificates has always been a challenge. At Microsoft, this issue arises quite frequently, often due to the company forgetting to update TLS digital certificates, causing websites to fail to load properly.

On June 28, a failure to update a certificate for a CDN link for Microsoft 365 affected a large number of users globally. However, certificate for the support website of Microsoft's SwiftKey keyboard at https://support.swiftkey.com/ has expired for over 25 days and has not been updated.

This website has been migrated to the Microsoft.com main domain, and its primary function now is to redirect to the main domain.

The digital certificate used by the site expired on June 10, 2024. Consequently, users trying to visit the site are directly blocked by browsers. If users choose to click on the advanced options and proceed, they can still be redirected.

Although this is a deprecated domain, it still serves a minor purpose by handling 301 redirects. Microsoft should either update the certificate to allow access or choose to completely abandon the domain and stop using it.

Microsoft acquired the SwiftKey keyboard (an input method) for $250 million in 2016. In 2022, Microsoft abruptly announced its intention to discontinue SwiftKey for iOS, which led to protests from many users. Microsoft then abandoned this idea and continued to provide updates.

The input method has now integrated the artificial intelligence application Copilot and has a good reputation. It has many long-term users abroad.