I also encountered this issue while working with Spring Boot 3.4.1, and upgrading httpclient5 to 5.4.1 resolved it.

Spring Boot 3+ internally uses Apache HttpClient 5 for HTTP communication. If your project depends on an older version (e.g., 5.2.x or 5.3.x), Spring Boot's auto-configuration may break due to missing classes like:

org/apache/hc/client5/http/ssl/TlsSocketStrategy

Thanks to the existing answer for pointing out the correct version upgrade!