Major incident

Brown University: Sporadic errors for several unrelated Brown services

Affected: Other

Current status of Brown University: Operational — live Brown University status

Timeline

1. Oct 20, 2026, 18:23 UTC
   investigating
   OIT has detected several Brown services that are not working as expected, showing an unexpected experience including Cloudflare errors, problems with system integrations, and problems with SSL certificates. We have identified these problems as being caused by recent changes in trust between global Certificate Authority organizations. OIT has identified a number of services that are at risk of being impacted, and we are addressing appropriate resolution in each case. We have already resolved known problems for register.birch.brown.edu and apps2.biomed.brown.edu. If you experience similar errors on a Brown service, please report it to the OIT Service Center at (401) 863-4357.
2. Oct 21, 2026, 00:02 UTC
   monitoring
   OIT has updated the security certificates on our VPN service, and some Windows computers may need to connect manually after the update. If you are having trouble connecting to Brown VPN and see a certificate error, please follow these troubleshooting steps.

Updates as published by Brown University (original).