November 30, 2022

The non-profit that runs Let’s Encrypt, the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), has revealed that the open certificate authority (CA) has issued its three billionth certificate this year.

Let’s Encrypt was founded in 2015 with a simple mission: to provide free X.509 certificates for Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption. As a result, the number of websites that can secure their communications with users via HTTPS has rapidly increased. Since September 2015, when it issued the first certificate for the helloworld.letsencrypt.org domain, it has provided free HTTPS (SSL/TLS) and encrypted communications.

Let’s Encrypt’s usage has also increased by over 33 million domains in 2022 after being trusted by all major browsers, operating systems, and root certificate programs including those from Microsoft, Google, Apple, Mozilla, Oracle, and Blackberry.

Let’s Encrypt provides TLS to over 309 million domains via 239 million active certificates as of November 1, 2022. It also stated that 82% of pages loaded by Firefox now use HTTPS on a global scale.

Let’s Encrypt announced in February 2020 that it had issued 1 billion certificates, less than three years after announcing the 100 million milestone.

The sources for this piece include an article in BleepingComputer.