While most people probably don't use a secure connection to reach Bing, those who do are being warned by their browsers this morning that something may be amiss. A misconfigured X.509 certificate on Microsoft's Bing search engine sites is causing errors for visitors over HTTP Secure (HTTPS) connections.

The certificate, which was apparently misconfigured by Akamai (which front-ends Bing for Microsoft), threw up warnings on browsers—including Internet Explorer—that the site might be fraudulent. A Firefox error indicated that the certificate was configured to be "only valid for the following names: a248.e.akamai.net , *.akamaihd.net , *.akamaihd-staging.net."

As of 10:30am Eastern time, the problem was still blocking visits to Bing via HTTPS. One poster on Hacker News who spotted the error on Chrome commented, "At first I thought it was a joke from Google. Something like: 'No you don't want to use bing, here is Google.'"



But the certificate problem isn't just restricted to Bing. Other Akamai customers, including NBA.com, are also affected by the malformed certificates.