Google and Network Solutions services were interrupted on Sep 1, 2026

Why you saw a security warning on September 1

Earlier today, visitors to Schedule Interpreter were met with a browser security warning: "Your connection is not private," or something similar. Some of you could click through it; others, especially on work devices, were blocked entirely. It's fixed now, and here's what happened.

Our site's security certificate expired before it could be renewed.

Certificates like ours renew automatically, but the renewal has to check in with our domain provider first to confirm we still own the domain. Our DNS provider, Network Solutions, had repeated outages today. Their DNS servers stopped responding during the early afternoon, right when that check needed to happen. The renewal couldn't complete, and the certificate lapsed.

Your data was never at risk. Traffic between your browser and our servers stayed encrypted the whole time. A certificate does two things: it encrypts the connection, and it carries an expiry date your browser checks. Only the date lapsed. There was no breach and no exposure of schedules, client records, interpreter details, or payment information.

We won't pretend the provider outage is the whole story, though. Our renewals are designed to start well before expiry, precisely so that a bad day at a vendor can't take us down. That safety margin should have absorbed this, and it didn't. We weren't alerted that renewals were failing, so we found out when you did. That gap is ours, not our provider's.

The outage that didn't reach you

Today was a bad day for infrastructure generally. You may have noticed Google services themselves acting up, with public reports of Google problems spiking roughly tenfold this morning. Behind that, Google Cloud was working through its own incident: about four hours of packet loss and errors across nineteen services in one of its Iowa zones, caused by routine network maintenance that went wrong. It overlapped the Network Solutions trouble almost exactly.

What you didn't see was any of that reaching Schedule Interpreter. After a previous incident, we built a failover layer that detects Google Cloud failures and switches over to our own infrastructure almost instantly. It did its job today, without anyone needing to intervene.

We're not telling you this to soften the news above. It's the same lesson twice over: assume every vendor will eventually fail, and build so that it doesn't reach you. We did that for our cloud services. We hadn't done it for our certificates.

What happens now

The certificate has been renewed and deployed, and the warnings have stopped. We're adding alerts on certificate expiry and on every failed renewal, so this surfaces weeks ahead instead of at the moment it breaks. We're also looking at secondary DNS, so a single provider outage can't block renewal again.

There's nothing you need to do: no password to change, no cache to clear. If you still see a warning, please tell us at helpdesk.flowplatform.cloud.

We're sorry for the disruption, and for the alarming way you found out about it.