Briefing
Harrowgate Games runs the backends for its launcher, store and online games behind one public gateway, with the internal services it calls living on core-svc-02.
At exactly 09:00 UTC login started failing for every player on every platform, yet the gateway's health endpoint has answered 200 the whole time, which is why the page arrived late.
The certificate monitor's last report says every certificate is healthy.
A launcher release reached 10% of players fifteen minutes before the failures began, and half the channel is already staring at it.
Inspired by a real outage: The Epic Games Certificate Expiration Public Incident Report (Epic Games, 2021). Names and details are fictionalized.
The fix is yours to find: hints, the recovery checks and the debrief unlock inside the incident.