| > This is absolute nonsense. Bitwarden has worked absolutely perfectly for me until now, their clients work just fine and it's the password manager I always suggest to people around me. Same for me. >I suspect that in case of a complete outage or while not connected to the internet the client will work just fine, but on this instance something got messed up on the autentication/authorization side, so your client tried to authenticate to their server to sync up/do whatever it needs, since the server was not down but experiencing problems it received an error and logged you out. If you're familiar with Bitwarden you're aware there is a Vault lock. When the laptop started and FF was launched, the extension got greyed out immediately. This means there's some sort of preflight init right after browser starts. This behavior is not documented anywhere on their website in the troubleshooting section. And that was my first attempt to figure out the cause. Next thing was to reinstall the application and check if the problem goes away. And only after that the email to support was dispatched. So, enough effort was put before contacting BW staff. The error message is misleading[0]. So I went on to support forum[1] to learn this problem is recurring. And while I was typing my message, I have seen several messages deleted by the staff. Same happened with mine. Given all that, where is my fault exactly? >What you're describing here looks like nothing more than an outage, a thing that literally everyone and their dog experiences, from the non-profit like us to AWS, Microsoft, Google and Cloudflare. It's an outage that indicated that you can loose access to BW Vault anytime they have an outage, means you can loose offline access even if the docs say otherwise[2]. To me it's false advertising at best given the iPhone's vault was in locked state as well but did not show any operational errors. Current BW users got aware of the incident and can draw conclusions and mitigate risks. I'm speaking for my experience and it's avoid at all costs now. [0] https://imgur.com/a/y4qYcFL [1] https://community.bitwarden.com/t/an-error-has-occured-acces... [2] https://bitwarden.com/help/using-bitwarden-offline/ |
Your devices were online and their server reachable but returning erroneous messages, if we have to go based on their forum response "in most cases, your IP is most likely getting flagged by cloud protection services as malicious activity" maybe even because of a third party provider.
> So I went on to support forum[1] to learn this problem is recurring. And while I was typing my message, I have seen several messages deleted by the staff. Same happened with mine.
While I can't speak for this problem, I understand this is frustrating and agree that the staff could have managed the situation differently, but they possibly knew about the outage and were simply de-cluttering the forum from what I imagine were dozens of messages about the same problem popping in at the same time.
> It's an outage that indicated that you can loose access to BW Vault anytime they have an outage, means you can loose offline access even if the docs say otherwise[2].
By definition, during an outage you lose access to the service, whatever it may be. Their docs say nothing about them, they state that while your devices are offline the clients can still be unlocked and used in read-only mode. While this means that in theory the apps could work while their services are not reachable for whatever reason, be it the device being offline or their server being completely down, this was not the case. I agree that they could improve the experience, so that if their services are not working as expected the clients revert to offline mode until the issue is resolved. This however is not an easy problem to manage and could only be an extra bonus feature to their service.
> Given all that, where is my fault exactly?
Sorry, maybe I didn't use the correct language, when I said you were at fault I wasn't of course talking about the outage, but you having issues logging into your accounts because everything is saved in Bitwarden. My point was that while their software is extremely convenient, it should not be the only place that stores all the means of accessing a service. Reading your post at first glance made me think that because of this outage you could not access credentials + TOTPs + recovery codes. but seeing > I'm lucky enough to have the offline access to the storage. I don't know about that anymore
> ...the iPhone's vault was in locked state as well but did not show any operational errors.
Does this mean that the iPhone app was still working or was it locked like the rest?