This is surprisingly messed up (SSL error)

I just fired up my trusty Android tablet and got a few strange errors---apps I didn't launch were popping up and taking over my screen to tell me there was no connection to the internet. This is behavior I haven't seen from them before, even when Wifi is turned off. When I got these errors my Wifi was connected, and I was connected to the same network on my phone and it was loading web pages just fine. From my tablet I was even able to connect to my local file server via Wifi without issue.

I open up Firefox and am told that Google.com is an untrusted source, or something to that effect.  Every site is.  What the hell is going on here?

I search for the problem on my phone and find a simple solution:  The date was set wrong.

My tablet had died a few days ago and must have really, really drained the battery, as the date was reset back to 01/01/2012.  Yeah.

As soon as I corrected the date, then everything came back up.  Everything.  Hangouts messages, other apps notifications.  Online banking info.  Emails.  Google Play update notifications.

I guess I had been getting new error behavior because there was a connection, the software just couldn't verify that it was secure.  Strange that the apps couldn't have a better error message saying the SSL was invalid, but that's how it goes.

I'm happy my tablet is working fine again, but I keep thinking about what went wrong.  You're telling me all it takes to severely break someone's internet connection is to set their date back?

I'm also wondering, does network time (which automatically updates electronic devices) also go through SSL?  If you changed the time enough to break SSL would that keep it from righting itself?

Hmm.  Seems pretty iffy to me,

David