This Thursday, September 30 at 4:01 p.m., owners of smartphones, tablets, and even some products like computers, game consoles, and pre-2017 smart TVs will have to say goodbye to the internet and the connected world.

A bug in a digital security certificate that will automatically ban all devices sold before January 2017, computer security researcher Scott Helme reports on his blog.

Thus the man warns that nearly a third of Android smartphones or tablets in circulation are likely to be affected by this problem. The same quack on the iPhone and iPad side that wouldn’t have been iOS10 (at least), while consoles like the PS4 or even Wii U that haven’t been updated since 2017, for example, may find themselves stuck. At the same time, connected TVs that have never been updated in four years or even PCs or Macs that haven’t made it past Windows XP (with Service Pack 2) or MacOS 10.12.0 will be found in the “Not being able to go back to web.

Required updates

Don’t panic, if you’ve since updated your product, the protocol won’t stop you from surfing the web. However, researcher Scott Helmy warns that hundreds of thousands of mobile phones, tablets and consoles will be affected, as many users do not think about updating their devices. In addition, some devices that are considered too old may not be able to be updated and therefore should be banned from the World Wide Web.

The last resort for some devices is to use Firefox as an internet browser because it does not use the same security certificate protocol. So Firefox will be a way around this problem, at least for PC and Mac owners.