Good morning! Woke up to find the server was running, but unable to accept SSL (https) connections after performing a C Drive image.
HTTPS/SSL is how our service delivers its web pages to a visitor. It simply is a mechanism to encrypt the information that is sent between the visitor and the servers. It is used in all ecommerce applications due to the sensitivity of the information being provided. Without it, the entire application breaks because information cannot be delivered by the server.
The Dev Team created a back "image" of the main operating system drive (Drive C:) on the web server. In our particular environment (Amazon EC2), when this process happens, the certificate gets corrupted in some way. It is more of a bug than anything else. The Amazon Web Services platform is still a new environment for most users, so there is a learning curve there. The process should not break an SSL certificate. We are inquiring to them about this issue so it does not happen in the future.
A short Google query session gave us the answer we were looking for. It appears other people have had this issue as well: http://serverfault.com/questions/74170/ssl-stopped-working-on-iis6-after-windows-update
The short of it is that the websites are all back up now and working well. The issue has been resolved and there are no other related issues from it. I apologize for the downtime, but appreciate your patience.
Shannon