Nonprofit certificate authority Let’s Encrypt hit a major milestone earlier this month: it issued its three billionth HTTPS certificate.
The Let’s Encrypt project was founded in 2013 to provide websites with free SSL and TLS certificates needed to enable HTTPS and encrypted communications. The organization, run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) and backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, issued its first HTTPS certificate in September 2015 for none other than its own domain.
The ISRG announced this week that Let’s Encrypt issued its three billionth certificate earlier this month and is now providing TLS to more than 309 million domains, an increase of 12% compared to the year earlier.
While Let’s Encrypt took five years to issue its billionth certificate, it has reached the three billion milestone just two years later.
The ISRG also revealed in its 2022 annual report that 82% of web pages loaded by Firefox are using HTTPS globally. When