Apache fails to start again after `certbot-auto renew` script

I’m working on a server where certbot-auto is being used to do autorenewals with Let’s Encrypt.
This is the cronjob:

service apache2 stop
/path/to/certbot/certbot-auto renew
service apache2 start

I discovered that apache2 did not start again, and the reason was that Python2.7 started using port 443 (discovered by running netstat -nlp). I had to kill that service and then apache started running again.
Python appears to have been triggered by running certbot-auto renew?

The script has worked historically - this is the first time it has started doing this.
Why would this only start happening now, and how can I prevent this from happening in future?

This seems to be related to:

Hi @simmbiote!

Can you provide your debug log file so we can see if the issue is exactly the same?

It is located at /var/log/letsencrypt/ but the most recent letsencrypt.log could refer to a successfully renewal you manually ran after certbot crashed, so you may have to look at the other numbered files to find the log from the one that failed.

Also, what date was your last certificate issued on? If you don’t know, please provide the domain name listed on the certificate and we can work it out from there. Since this may be a regression in a recent certbot version, this would give us an idea of the last certbot version that worked.

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