Chase.com Goes Down For Firefox Users

Firefox users had trouble accessing JPMorgan Chase’s website chase.com today when the bank experienced problems with an outdated security certificate. Going by a Chase spokesman, the Firefox certificate was updated on the bank’s servers in about 45 minutes, fixing the issue.

The outage involved a lapsed security certificate. Website servers present certificates to a customer’s browsers to verify identities. This certificate, which has information such as the address of the site, is verified by a third party that is trusted by a user’s computer. A certificate that is outdated or lapsed would appear as having been revoked by the issuing server.

While short lived, today’s outage was still a major issue, according to market research firm Celent.

No bank wants its customers to be presented with the message, “you may be communicating with an attacker.” – Jacob Jegher, Celent analyst

Jegher said if the issue hadn’t been resolved quickly, Chase could have ended up paying out reimbursements to customers unable to pay bills on time