The issue has been resolved. It was caused by the failure of a software daemon simultaneously on multiple servers. This is a lightweight and highly efficient service manager that has never failed in the past.
During the period, between 3% and 58% of HTTPS requests returned an error, depending on which of the 25 CDN locations received the request.
We are now investigating why this happened and will be taking actions to prevent this from impacting service availability in the future.