By Josh Aas, ISRG Executive Director · March 8, 2016

Let’s Encrypt has issued its millionth certificate. Our first million certificates are helping to secure approximately 2.4 million domains. This milestone means a lot to a team that started building a CA from scratch 16 months ago with an aim to have a real impact on the security of the Web as soon as possible.

We want to see HTTPS become the default on the Web, and today’s occasion gives us confidence that we’re going to get there - much faster than even we predicted. We’re growing at a current rate of more than 100,000 certificates per week and don’t see this slowing down anytime soon. This is dramatic and very rapid change for the Web.

Our rapid growth is due to strong demand for an easy-to-use, low-cost, widely trusted, and truly global solution for certificate issuance and management. We also received a considerable boost from industry endorsement, with major hosting companies like OVH, Wordpress.com, Gandi, Dreamhost, and Digital Ocean helping many sites move to HTTPS with Let’s Encrypt.

HTTPS has been around for a long time but according to Firefox telemetry only ~40% of websites and ~65% of transactions used HTTPS at the end of 2015. Those numbers should both be 100% if the Web is to provide the level of privacy and security that people expect, and Let’s Encrypt is going to lead the way.

Let’s Encrypt depends on support from a wide variety of individuals and organizations. Please consider getting involved, and if your company or organization would like to sponsor Let’s Encrypt please email us at sponsor@letsencrypt.org.