Bitwarden Password Manager Recovers After a Brief Outage, Affecting Many Users

The potential problems of using online password managers include data breaches and service interruptions. Recently, the paid hosted version of the open-source password manager Bitwarden experienced a server outage that prevented many users from accessing their accounts normally.

Bitwarden's hosted version, which stores user data across multiple data centers, experienced a failure that resulted in users being logged out and unable to reconnect to the server to decrypt their data. Fortunately, this outage lasted just over an hour.

As of now, services including authentication and the repository have been restored to normal. Bitwarden has not yet provided a specific reason for the outage, but a report investigating the incident might be published in the future.

For users of Bitwarden, the paid hosted version is simple to use and relatively stable. If users opt for the open-source version and host the data themselves, the reliability depends on their deployment scheme. This incident suggests that deploying one's open-source solution could be a viable option.

Information provided by Bitwarden's status page:

Intermittent access failure from 11:52 PM EST on January 7, 2025, to 01:19 AM EST on January 8, 2025

During the outage, access to US cloud services / US identity services and US cloud services / US WebVault services was disrupted

Scheduled maintenance from 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM EST on January 7, 2025, covered cloud services in the US and EU

According to the status page, the outage occurred within the maintenance window, suggesting a high probability that operations or changes made during routine maintenance caused the failure. Specific details are expected in a subsequent report from Bitwarden.