diff --git a/appveyor.yml b/appveyor.yml
index f6108c6..aa1edb5 100644
--- a/appveyor.yml
+++ b/appveyor.yml
@@ -1,4 +1,24 @@
 environment:
+
+  # At the time this was added AppVeyor was having troubles with checking
+  # revocation of SSL certificates of sites like static.rust-lang.org and what
+  # we think is crates.io. The libcurl HTTP client by default checks for
+  # revocation on Windows and according to a mailing list [1] this can be
+  # disabled.
+  #
+  # The `CARGO_HTTP_CHECK_REVOKE` env var here tells cargo to disable SSL
+  # revocation checking on Windows in libcurl. Note, though, that rustup, which
+  # we're using to download Rust here, also uses libcurl as the default backend.
+  # Unlike Cargo, however, rustup doesn't have a mechanism to disable revocation
+  # checking. To get rustup working we set `RUSTUP_USE_HYPER` which forces it to
+  # use the Hyper instead of libcurl backend. Both Hyper and libcurl use
+  # schannel on Windows but it appears that Hyper configures it slightly
+  # differently such that revocation checking isn't turned on by default.
+  #
+  # [1]: https://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2016-03/0202.html
+  RUSTUP_USE_HYPER: 1
+  CARGO_HTTP_CHECK_REVOKE: false
+
   matrix:
   - TARGET: x86_64-pc-windows-msvc
     ARCH: amd64