The underlying connection was closed - An unexpected error occurred

Problem statement

When issuing the Invoke-RestMethod to interact with a web API you get the following error message:

Invoke-RestMethod : The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send

Root cause and solution

Issue is PowerShell, by default, uses TLS version 1.0 which is disabled on any modern platform due to security risks associated with the use of it.

To solve this simply issue the following command:

# Enable TLS 1.2 as Security Protocol
[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12

If you need to support multiple versions you can do so like this

# Enable TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.1 as fallback
[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12,
[Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls11

Keep in mind the above will be effective only for the active PowerShell session where command is executed and it is not a system wide configuration.

What I usually do is setting the TLS version as part of my scripts so it automatically configured when script is executed.

I also put this in my PowerShell profile so don’t have to manually set this when I open a new PowerShell session.