Certificate Failures Now Exceed $250K for One in Four Enterprises, DigiCert Warns

DigiCert has released new findings from its global Certificate Management Outlook, revealing that certificate-related incidents are becoming more costly and more disruptive for enterprises as certificate volumes rise and lifecycles shrink.

According to the report, nearly one in four organizations said their most significant certificate incident cost more than $250,000, a five percent increase over last year. More than one-third of surveyed organizations experienced a service outage caused by an expired certificate during the past year, and nearly three-quarters reported at least five hours of certificate-related downtime. One in five endured 25 hours or more.

These prolonged outages are increasingly viewed as enterprise resilience failures rather than isolated security issues. More than half of respondents classified certificate outages as infrastructure problems, reflecting how expiration events can disrupt critical services, stall employee productivity, and erode customer trust.

Automated certificate lifecycle management now ranks as the third-highest cybersecurity priority for organizations, ahead of simplifying compliance, standardizing IoT security, and expanding Zero Trust. Yet adoption remains slow. Only 10 percent of respondents said they already have automation in place, with many citing legacy system incompatibility and budget constraints as barriers.

"An expired certificate can shut down a critical service just as quickly as any other infrastructure failure," said Mike Nelson, Global Vice President and Field CTO at DigiCert. He noted that shrinking certificate lifecycles — soon limited to 47 days for public TLS certificates — make manual tracking impossible. "Organizations need to know every certificate they have, where it is, who owns it, and then automate the lifecycle before an overlooked expiration becomes a business outage."

The pressure is expected to intensify. Nearly three-quarters of organizations anticipate certificate volumes increasing over the next two years, and more than half already manage over 1,000 certificates. Beginning in 2029, industry rules will limit public TLS certificates to 47 days and domain validation reuse to 10 days. DigiCert estimates that an enterprise managing 1,000 public TLS certificates could face roughly 8,000 certificate issuances and 40,000 domain validations each year under the new rules.

Additional findings from the report include:

- Thirty percent of organizations are still not actively preparing for shorter certificate lifecycles.
- Preparation varies by region: 74 percent of U.S. organizations are actively preparing, compared with 71 percent in the U.K. and 62 percent in Australia.
- Legacy technology incompatibility is the top barrier to automation at 25 percent, followed by budget constraints at 21 percent.
- Forty percent experienced service downtime due to certificate mismanagement, and more than half are very or extremely concerned about certificate expiration.

The study was conducted by Propeller Insights in May 2026 and surveyed 1,001 IT and cybersecurity decision makers across the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia.