This cost me far too much of my time yesterday night: I had reconnected my Android Tablet (Galaxy 10.1) after running out of battery for quite a while and connected to my wireless and surfed the web – all fine – except for “certificate errors” on a few pages. This is nothing new, SSL is broken far too often sadly enough.

When connecting to the Market to download new apps or get my Google Mail or Reader items it always told me though that I was offline. Looking at Android forums I got a lot of wrong advice like “Going back to Best Buy”, “Deleting cache and force-stopping Market and rebooting the device” or “doing a factory reset”.

The fix is simple:

If your Android tablet throws certificate errors when surfing and can’t connect to the market, your time and date are wrong and set in the past. This breaks the SSL negotiation. Simply fix time and date and it works without you losing data.

This should be part of the error message when you get certificate errors.