Emergency Dental Platform: Solving Critical SSL Issues at Scale

Challenge:
A major teledentistry platform connecting emergency dental patients with providers, was experiencing intermittent SSL handshake failures in their Rails application. With both iOS and Android apps depending on their API, these failures were disrupting emergency dental care coordination. Every minute of downtime potentially meant a patient in pain couldn’t connect with a dentist.

Emergency Response:

• Rapidly assessed SSL handshake failures in production

• Identified deprecated SSL methods in the new codebase

• Discovered incompatibilities between client apps and updated API security protocols

• Required immediate protocol updates while maintaining backward compatibility

Solution:

• Implemented emergency hotfix for SSL handshake methods

• Updated SSL protocol negotiation to support both legacy and modern clients

• Verified connections across all platforms

Critical Success Factors:

• Resolution achieved within hours of initial contact

• Maintained backward compatibility for existing users

• Immediate verification across all client platforms

Results:

• Restored stable connections for all users

• Eliminated SSL handshake failures

• Maintained security standards while ensuring compatibility

• Provided long-term protocol upgrade path