Tag Archives: iTunes

Problem: For no reason,  I couldn’t install anything from AppStore on my iPhone today, it popped up a new  iTunes Terms & Conditions and when I clicked “OK”, it said “Cannot connect to the store – A secure connection could not be established. Please check Date & Time settings“. In fact, I accepted a new Terms & Conditions a month ago without problem, now WTF is this?  Apple servers are currently down or am I the only one having this issue? I verified the date/time and even rebooted couple times, still no luck.

Analysis: Switching to my laptop, I downloaded and installed the latest iTunes from Apple. When I clicked  “Sign In” or even “Create a new Account”, I got the same error message from my iPhone! That’s unbelievable.  Interestingly, when I clicked “Forgot Password” button, it brought me to a SSL page. I noticed something strange, because Internet Explorer prompted me a security warning on expired certificate. Looking into details, all domain *.itunes.apple.com expired on 8/28/2009.  (see picture below)  What the hell? Someone should got fired by Apple on this, it must be someone installed the wrong certificate some time this week.

Workaround: Noticing the expiry problem, it started to make sense when the error message I got was related to “Date/Time Settings”.   So,  I changed my iPhone Date/Time manually to Aug 1, 2009 (Basically any date between 8/26/2008 to 8/28/2009 should be good) and it worked!!! Bingo!  Fucking stupid mofo Apple pissed me off. I then read someone on the forums reporting this happened on PC, Mac, iPhone, and iPad.  I hope Apple realized this and updated the stupid certificate, and Thanks for wasting my time for the whole morning.