OS X 10.10 Yosemite/Server 4.0 outbound encrypted server communications problem

Since updating to OS X 10.10 Yosemite/Server 4.0, lots of things related to outbound encrypted server communications that worked just fine under OS X 10.9.x Mavericks/Server 3.x are broken.

For example, WordPress Jetpack refused to authenticate. This was resolved by adding define( 'JETPACK_CLIENT__HTTPS', 'NEVER' ); to the wp-config.php file.

Similarly, Jetpack's Related Posts module refused to work until I changed a line of code from an https:// reference to http://

A more general example is that none of my VPN connections were working until I migrated everything from L2TP and PPTP to OpenVPN.

Now I'm trying to get another piece of code working that uses my Google Developer API key to access Google's Web Fonts. The specific error that I'm getting is: "Error fetching Google font: SSLRead() return error -9806" I tried changing the https:// reference in the code to http:// but Google won't accept this.

Any ideas?