Expired Certificate Revocation List

A Storm Knocked Out Power — But It Was a PKI Failure That Kept It Down

Following a severe tornado, a regional electric utility was ready to roll out its fleet to clear debris and restore downed power lines. But something unexpected happened — the dispatch couldn’t reach the trucks. Communications were down, but not because of the storm.

For hours, teams searched in the dark — figuratively and literally — to uncover the root cause while customers waited without power, and frustrations mounted.

Four hours later, they called one of our PKI Solutions consultants. Within 30 minutes, he traced the issue back to the failed CRL publication and expired status, which had silently disrupted operations.

It was a PKI issue: an expired Certificate Revocation List (CRL) prevented certificate validation, halting secure communication between dispatch and the field crews. The CRL had not only expired, but the publish operation had failed, leaving dispatch systems unable to authenticate connections.

This is precisely the type of scenario PKI Spotlight^® is built to prevent.

PKI Spotlight would have alerted on:

The upcoming CRL expiration, well in advance
The failed CRL publish operation
The resulting certificate validation failures

This is all done in near real-time, with full visibility into the chain of events. This isn’t just monitoring — it’s operational resilience in action.

Don’t wait for a crisis to reveal the gaps in your PKI. Invest in modern PKI monitoring that gives you visibility before outages happen.

See how PKI Spotlight can help your organization stay ahead of outages.