This is lame, but many, many, many hosts have misconfigured SSL.
When Jetpack is registered, the jetpack_fallback_no_verify_ssl_certs option is set to the current time if:
1. a certificate error is found AND
2. not verifying the certificate works around the problem.
The option is checked on each request.
public static _wp_remote_request ( $url, $args, $set_fallback = false ) : array | WP_Error | ||
return | array | WP_Error | WP HTTP response on success |