u/rrrevin

Obviously, picking up after your dog is Responsible Dog Ownership 101. Nobody wants to go for a peaceful walk, jog through a field, and suddenly discover a mystery landmine with their shoe. But lately I keep seeing people do the first half of the job… and then absolutely quit the assignment. They bag the poop, tie it up, and then toss the bag into the bushes like they’re returning it to nature.

Respectfully: what are we doing? Unbagged poop is gross, yes. But bagged poop abandoned in the woods is like giving the poop a tiny plastic apartment where it can live for the next several hundred years. Even if the bag says compostable, the forest is not a magical poop-bag processing facility.

Rant over. Please either use a bin or carry it until you find one. And to whoever keeps leaving these little forbidden lunch bags everywhere: your dog did their part. Now do yours.

For anyone else seeing pCloud uploads stuck recently: I noticed a few days ago that all of my uploads had stopped moving. Nothing was completing, and the upload queue just kept retrying.

I checked with a few other people and a friend also mentioned they had found a FB post about expired TLS certificates on some pCloud servers as they were seeing the same thing. So I started digging through the pCloud debug logs,

What I found is that the desktop client appears to be failing during TLS negotiation with some of the upload/checksum endpoints. In the logs, the pattern looks like this:

pssl-wolfssl.c:204 (function psync_set_ssl_error): got error -151
pssl-wolfssl.c:361 (function psync_ssl_connect_finish): returning PSYNC_SSL_FAIL
pnetlibs.c:1631 (function psync_net_get_checksums): assertion unlikely_log(!http) failed
pnetlibs.c:2248 (function psync_net_scan_file_for_blocks): assertion unlikely_log(rt==-2) failed
pupload.c:1722 (function task_run_upload_file_thread): Upload task failed

The important part is:

got error -151
returning PSYNC_SSL_FAIL

pCloud appears to use wolfSSL internally, and wolfSSL error -151 corresponds to a certificate date/expiry problem. In plain English: the client is trying to connect securely, but the server certificate appears to be invalid because of its date.

In my logs, the failures were happening against hosts like:

j2196.pcloud.com
j2203.pcloud.com
j2209.pcloud.com

This is the output from a script I wrote to parse the pCloud debug log and look at the certificate date of any pCloud hostname found:

hostname               certificate_expiry_utc   expired  days_until_expiry
---------------------  -----------------------  -------  -----------------
binapi.pcloud.com      2027-02-11 15:40:47 UTC  NO       276                     
binapiwas1.pcloud.com  2027-02-11 15:40:47 UTC  NO       276                     
j2196.pcloud.com       2026-02-27 13:50:03 UTC  YES      -74                     
j2203.pcloud.com       2026-02-27 13:50:03 UTC  YES      -74                     
j2209.pcloud.com       2026-02-27 13:50:03 UTC  YES      -74                     
j2210.pcloud.com       2026-02-27 13:50:03 UTC  YES      -74                     
j2214.pcloud.com       2026-02-27 13:50:03 UTC  YES      -74                     
j2218.pcloud.com       2026-02-27 13:50:03 UTC  YES      -74 

Notice the pattern? j####.pcloud.com hosts appear to be pCloud backend upload/checksum hosts used by the desktop sync client during file upload processing. When checking these hosts, the affected servers I tested all appeared to have the same TLS certificate expiry date: 2026-02-27 13:50:03 UTC

That would explain why uploads are stuck: the client is correctly refusing to continue when the secure connection cannot be validated. One possible reason some people are seeing this and others are not: it may depend on which backend upload/checksum endpoints your client gets assigned to. If the client lands on one of the affected `j####.pcloud.com` hosts, uploads may fail; if it lands on a different host with a valid certificate, uploads may continue normally. So this may look intermittent or account/system-specific even if the underlying issue is with a subset of pCloud’s backend endpoints.

To check your own logs, enable debug logging in pCloud, then look on your C drive for a directory called: C:\tmp

For whatever reason, at least on my system, pCloud does not appear to be writing this debug output to the normal Windows temp directory. Look under C:\tmp for a pCloud / psync debug log file, then search for:

PSYNC_SSL_FAIL
error -151
psync_net_get_checksums
task_run_upload_file_thread
Upload task failed

As far as I know, pCloud is aware of the issue. Now we wait for a fix.

I cannot prove with absolute certainty that the expired certificates are the root cause of everyone’s stuck uploads, but I strongly suspect they are involved. And even if this turns out not to be the only cause, pCloud seriously needs to update those certificates.

Letting backend upload/checksum infrastructure certificates expire is not something a cloud storage provider should be comfortable with.

To be clear, I am not saying anyone should disable certificate checks. You absolutely should not. Certificate validation is what protects you from connecting to the wrong server or having your traffic intercepted.

If others are seeing the same stuck-upload behavior, it would be useful to check your logs and report whether you see the same error -151 / PSYNC_SSL_FAIL pattern, especially against the j####.pcloud.com upload/checksum hosts.