Hello!
Following the Plex auth service outage on 24 Jan 2023, it appears some people are having trouble logging into the plex.tv service on some or all of their devices. I’ve had this problem and was directed to the forums by Plex support to post a question here… a forum I couldn’t log into. So now that I’ve solved this I wanted to write this post with the solution provided, as others experiencing this issue aren’t able to do so.
Identify the issue:
- Opening https://plex.tv in any browser will show “Connection is secure” with details showing a certificate for plex.tv from Cloudflare, valid from 25 Jan 2023 - 25 Apr 2023
- Opening https://plex.tv/api will show a page saying “Your Connection is Not Private” with (in Chrome) an error like ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID or something similar in other browsers. If this page instead shows a plex-branded 404 page, then this isn’t the issue you’re having.
- Looking at the certificate on https://plex.tv/api will show that it’s a certificate issued to, in my case, a logistics company called worldoptions who are completely unrelated to plex or this issue. That particular certificate is issued by Amazon and valid from 10 May 2022 - 9 June 2023. I’ve seen some other certificates mentioned though.
The cause:
- My working theory of what’s happening is that the mitigation to whatever the issue with the plex Auth service outage on 24 Jan 2023 resulted in a change to IPs and/or certificates, a change which needs to be propagated around the internet so all certificate and DNS caches are updated.
- The certificate that’s being returned when https://plex.tv/api is accessed is for some other service. From my understanding of certificates, the request should be based on URL, not IP, but some sort of desync has happened somewhere between my computer and Cloudflare / DigiCert who issue plex.tv and *.plex.tv certificates respectfully.
The solution:
- I’m sorry, it’s a meme one, but it’s what’s the solution is:
- Restart all routers between you and the internet. Yes, no, really. (do the same for the network the plex server is on)
- If you don’t have access to these routers, switching your device’s DNS to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 or some other public DNS service should help.
This problem should auto-resolve itself given enough time, however this is what worked for me and, it seems, others.
