Today a lot of very smart people sat down at their Macs, picked up perfectly functional Logitech mice and keyboards – and discovered they no longer worked.
Scroll wheels reverted to default behavior. Button mappings disappeared. Custom workflows vanished. Not because of malware. Not because of a zero-day exploit. Not because of a nation-state attack.
Because a certificate expired.
Logitech let a macOS Developer ID certificate lapse, and macOS did exactly what it was designed to do: refuse to run software it could no longer verify as authentic. The result? Logi Options+ and G HUB wouldn’t launch. In some cases, they entered endless boot loops.
Even Logitech’s own update mechanisms failed because they depended on that same expired certificate.
To their credit, Logitech owned the mistake. They called it “inexcusable.” They shipped a fix and provided a support page. They apologized.
But the real story here isn’t about Logitech. The story is about how manual certificate management quietly undermines digital trust in modern enterprises.
A Huge Visibility Problem
Every modern enterprise runs on digital certificates. They’re the machine identities securing applications, APIs, workloads, devices, and user experiences across the infrastructure.
The problem? Most organizations can’t see all of them:
- They can’t renew them fast enough.
- They can’t coordinate ownership across IT, security, and development.
- And they can’t keep up as certificates multiply faster than humans can track them.
So when a certificate expires, the failure looks sudden, but it isn’t. It’s the visible symptom of an invisible problem that’s been building for months or years.
Customer portals go down. APIs fail. Devices behave unpredictably. Productivity stalls.
And in many environments, the cost of that downtime averages $5,600 per minute – before you factor in reputational damage, customer trust erosion, or compliance exposure. A mouse stopped scrolling properly. But the same failure mode takes payment systems offline.
Certificates Expire Because Ownership Is Fractured
The MacRumors comments got to the root cause almost instantly:
“Someone had it on their calendar. They left. The replacement didn’t know. It lapsed.”
That’s not cynicism. That’s experience.
Cloud adoption, DevOps velocity, and SaaS sprawl have decentralized certificate ownership across teams that don’t share tooling, processes, or accountability. What used to live with a central PKI team is now scattered across pipelines, platforms, vendors, and environments.
Meanwhile, regulatory frameworks increasingly demand provable cryptographic visibility and agility, not just “we think it’s covered.”
Manual processes were never designed for this reality. They break not because people are careless, but because the system no longer matches the scale or speed of the business.
The Shift: Automation Is Survival
Certificate automation isn’t about convenience. It isn’t about saving a few hours of operational effort. And it isn’t just a “PKI problem.”
It’s about business continuity.
Under today’s shortened certificate lifecycles, manual or semi-outsourced renewal programs are already failing. As certificate volumes grow, the operational workload doesn’t increase linearly, it explodes.
Organizations that continue down that path face rising costs, more outages, and increasing compliance risk. Those that automate flatten the curve: fewer incidents, lower operational overhead, and measurable resilience gains.
And looming over all of this is the post-quantum transition.
Soon, enterprises will be forced to reissue nearly every certificate they own using new cryptographic algorithms. This is a full-scale identity migration.
How the Industry Can Improve
Logitech’s response was fast, transparent, and human. That matters.
But we shouldn’t keep calling these incidents “inexcusable mistakes” and moving on. They’re predictable outcomes of certificate management models that haven’t evolved with the rest of the technology stack.
If it’s not DNS, it’s certificates.
And when it’s certificates, the question isn’t whether this will happen again – it’s where, how broadly, and how prepared you’ll be when it does.
Digital trust rarely fails all at once. Sometimes, it starts with a mouse.
The organizations that pay attention to those signals are the ones that stay ahead – before the next expiration turns into a much bigger problem.
