Bitwarden’s web vault suffers an outage; apps and extensions are safe and unaffected

Bitwarden’s web vault suffered an outage today.  The issue affected all users that use the web service, though the password manager service’s apps and extensions were unaffected and are completely safe

Bitwarden’s web vault goes down due to server issues

I came across a few complaints from users that they were unable to access Bitwarden on the web, but I thought it was just downtime caused by some routine maintenance on the server. But a screenshot posted by another user got me curious, and when I tried to open the web vault, it gave me an error too. The above image is from my computer, and you can see that I was logged into the web extension, which obviously is accessed via the same browser and IP address. What gives?

This should not be a big issue for most people, since Bitwarden’s apps and extensions were working fine, you would rarely need to rely on the web vault, for example to change your account settings, password, etc. But when a cloud-based password manager goes offline, even if it is a partial outage, it is only natural that users get a little bit concerned about it. Who could blame them for panicking given the recent LastPass data breach and Norton Password Manager brute force attacks?

It’s also worth noting that scammers were (possibly still are) targeting Bitwarden users (and 1Password users) via phishing campaigns in subtly-placed ads on Google’s search results. These attacks directed users to web pages that were in fact meticulously designed clones of Bitwarden’s web vault, only these were malicious in nature and stole the username and password given by the users.

This is actually what threw me off. The URL of the web vault that I accessed was correct, i.e., https://vault.bitwarden.com/. But, the error that was displayed said, “Sorry, you have been blocked. You are unable to access web-vault.pages.dev”.

This was quite confusing. A discussion at the Bitwarden community forums indicates that this issue actually began 2 days ago (February 7th, 2023). One of the developers had cleared the air by stating that there was an issue with the service, and that the Cloudflare URL that is used by Bitwarden was visible to users during the outage. Well, clearly the issue has resurfaced, as I ran into it today. Cloudflare’s status page says some servers are being rerouted, but I’m not sure if the two issues are related.

You may track the status of the web vault’s outage at this page on Bitwarden’s site. The updates logged on the page say that the company has been investigating the issue, and worked with its upstream provider to resolve it. Another message posted at the issue tracker says that Bitwarden has applied a fix, and is monitoring the components. A recent update published about half an hour ago on the status page states the service is experiencing intermittent issues again, and is working on fixing the problem.

I tried accessing the vault again, and it didn’t load the first time, but when I refreshed the web page’s cache with Ctrl + F5, it worked. I can confirm that I am able to access the web vault at the time of writing this article. Maybe you could try the same to view your vault?

One user claimed that they had received alerts about multiple login attempts on their account, and that they were unable to sign in when they had tried to, wondering if the service had been hacked.

Summary

Article Name

Bitwarden’s web vault suffers an outage

Description

Bitwarden’s web vault has suffered a server outage. The password manager’s apps and extensions were unaffected by the issue.

Author

Ashwin

Publisher

Ghacks Technology News

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