Renewal fails

[oywino]

NPM fails to renew a valid Let's Encrypt certificate with the message "Internal Error".
I'm running Nginx 1.14.2 and I have used it to obtain a valid Let's encrypt certificate that is about to expire. So it's time to renew.
The certificate has been in use for almost three months with no problems what so ever.
Prior to renewal, my firewall is set to point to the server where NPM is running with 80 --> 35080 and 443 --> 35443
This is the output on the console when renewal fails:

[2020-7-10] [21:37:19] [SSL      ] › ℹ  info      Renewing Let'sEncrypt certificates for Cert #1: xxxxx.yyyy.com                                      
[2020-7-10] [21:37:21] [Express  ] › ⚠  warning   Command failed: /usr/bin/certbot renew --non-interactive --config "/etc/letsencrypt.ini" --cert-name "n
pm-1" --preferred-challenges "dns,http" --disable-hook-validation                                                                                        
Saving debug log to /config/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                         
Traceback (most recent call last):                                                                                                                       
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/certbot/renewal.py", line 67, in _reconstitute renewal_candidate = storage.RenewableCert(full_path, config) 
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/certbot/storage.py", line 461, in __init__self._check_symlinks()                                                                                                                               
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/certbot/storage.py", line 520, in _check_symlinks "expected {0} to be a symlink".format(link)) certbot.errors.CertStorageError: expected /etc/letsencrypt/live/npm-1/cert.pem to be a symlink                                                           
Renewal configuration file /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/npm-1.conf is broken. Skipping.                                                                      
0 renew failure(s), 1 parse failure(s) 

I really do need some help here to find out why renewal fails.
Many thanks in advance.

[pantherale0]

See #396

[oywino]

Thanks for the tip.
I see that a lot of others have similar problem - and no one has found a solution.
That's really sad.

[chaptergy]

Unfortunately, yes. But I'll close this as a duplicate of #396.