Cannot retrieve metalink for repository: epel on centos 6

I've got a VM running CentOS 6 (64bit) and I'm attempting to add the EPEL repo like usual to install various packages as I do quite regularly.

Today, I'm experiencing some strange errors yet I'm doing absolutely nothing differently.

I'm adding EPEL like so:

# wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
# rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Yet when I try running yum for anything, I'm getting this error:

[root@core /]# yum list

Loaded plugins: fastestmirror

Determining fastest mirrors

Error: Cannot retrieve metalink for repository: epel. Please verify its path and try again

Any ideas? I'm stumped!

The correct fix is to update your SSL certificates.

sudo yum upgrade ca-certificates --disablerepo=epel

You need to disable the epel repo so that this command will succeed. After you update your certificates you can use yum normally as EPEL will work again.