Event ID 100

AD CS Event 100: CA service fails to start (revocation offline)

Last reviewed 2026-07-18 by the Just Software engineering team · also seen as certificationauthority event 100, ca service will not start

What it means

Event ID 100 from Microsoft-Windows-CertificationAuthority reports that Active Directory Certificate Services did not start because it could not load or verify the CA's own certificate. When the inner error is CRYPT_E_REVOCATION_OFFLINE (0x80092013), the issuing CA cannot validate its chain because the parent (usually offline root) CA's CRL has expired or is unreachable. The whole issuing CA is down until revocation data is fixed.

Common causes

  1. The offline root CA's CRL expired — the annual boot-and-publish ritual was missed.

  2. A fresh root CRL exists but was never copied to the HTTP CDP location the issuing CA checks.

  3. The CDP host was decommissioned during a migration while the issuing CA's chain still points at it.

How to fix it

  1. Power on the offline root CA, publish a new CRL (certutil -crl), and copy it to every CDP location referenced in the issuing CA's certificate; then start CertSvc.

  2. Verify with certutil -verify -urlfetch against the issuing CA's own certificate that all CDP fetches now succeed.

  3. As a temporary emergency measure only, you can start the CA while ignoring offline revocation: certutil -setreg ca\CRLFlags +CRLF_REVCHECK_IGNORE_OFFLINE, restart CertSvc, and remove the flag (-setreg ca\CRLFlags -CRLF_REVCHECK_IGNORE_OFFLINE) once the CRL is fixed.

  4. Put root CRL publication in the calendar with a reminder well before Next Update — or set a long CRL validity on the root appropriate to your rotation schedule.

An unhandled error has occurred. Reload 🗙