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Bitwarden: Avoid at all costs (outage issue)

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Bitwarden: Avoid at all costs (outage issue)

#1
Bitwarden is experiencing an outage right now.

What I learned about it, is that they can remotely disable your browser extension which is assumed to work in offline mode. So, as soon as you have an internet connection — you get blocked. This is what happened to me like 30 minutes ago or so. Just cannot log into my account and verify a transaction because I'm stupid enough to trust them with my TOTPs and storing temp verification passwords.

The funniest stuff, though, is that the company's damage control is to remove the comments and suspend feedback from it's community forum. Given that I'm a paying customer, I'm a little bit offended by it. For a secret management company that secured $100 mil recently, it's a clear mark that the enterprise service train is on the way.

I'm lucky enough to have the offline access to the storage. But my trust to Bitwarden as a reliable service is completely ruined. Having this in mind, is there a viable alternative?

PS. Expect Spearrin to appear on HN and bring "personal" apology for the hiccup. But I won't buy it. Password manager services are almost like bank storages but on the internet. Apologizing won't fix the fact you can get remotely locked from the passwords and TOTPs at a pressing moment.

Re: Bitwarden: Avoid at all costs (outage issue)

#3

If you need "seven nines", your best bet might be to host it yourself. Probably not going to find it anywhere for $10/yr

You're one of the anon-Bitwarden boys?

1) I want sane error messages on the client side.

2) I want my feedback on community forums not to be shushed. You screwed up — own it. Community mods aren't janitors to wipe out user feedback.

3) I want the extension to be working no matter what kind of server-side problems you have. Let me know about a sync problem but don't terminate my access.

But if you do think, that for $12 I get to be treated like an dog, too bad, there's enough options for me to take my business elsewhere.

Re: Bitwarden: Avoid at all costs (outage issue)

#4

If you need "seven nines", your best bet might be to host it yourself. Probably not going to find it anywhere for $10/yr

You're one of the anon-Bitwarden boys? 1) I want sane error messages on the client side. 2) I want my feedback on community forums not to be shushed. You screwed up — own it. Community mods aren't janitors to wipe out user feedback. 3) I want the extension to be working no matter what kind of server-side problems you have. Let me know about a sync problem but don't terminate my access. But if you do think, that for $…

I can recommend Keeper (my current password manager of 2 years) or Passpack (previous password manager of 5 years). Never experienced any problems with either.

I am surprised that they are not more popular than "fan-favorites" like LastPass which I absolutely can't stand (it's like from the dark ages UX wise) or 1Password, or, for that matter, Bitwarden. Bitwarden particularly experience degradation of service like every month or so, maybe due to their popularity.

Re: Bitwarden: Avoid at all costs (outage issue)

#5
Enpass

- Local-first so you own your data

- Open about technical documentation and assisted in providing encryption scheme info to an open-source vault reader (so you own your data...) https://github.com/hazcod/enpass-cli

- Works with lots of cloud/sync providers

- Cross-platform (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android)

- Browser integration (Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi)

- Lifetime license for $79.99

Re: Bitwarden: Avoid at all costs (outage issue)

#6
So, as expected this is the response from the BW people. No one got hurt, no one to be blamed. Grab a beer, turn on your Netflix and be happy.

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Bitwarden.

If you are receiving this message, you have contacted us about errors accessing your Bitwarden account. We would like to first apologize for any inconvenience.

Access should no longer be impeded when authenticating.

In our mission to continually strengthen services and protect Bitwarden users, we have employed many protections to that end. These are ever evolving and constantly being tuned. With these in place, there is potential for temporary false positives. The team is committed to refining and improving these protections.

We thank you for bringing this to our attention, and for your understanding. If you have any further questions, please let us know.

-The Bitwarden Team

Re: Bitwarden: Avoid at all costs (outage issue)

#7
I also got hit by this, with the message "Access denied, contact customer support" ... Access denied for MY personal password database! I get that Bitwarden uploads the DB file to their cloud for seamless sharing, but why the hell is my local login/decryption reliant on THEIR login service being up?? Not acceptable.

Re: Bitwarden: Avoid at all costs (outage issue)

#8

I also got hit by this, with the message "Access denied, contact customer support" ... Access denied for MY personal password database! I get that Bitwarden uploads the DB file to their cloud for seamless sharing, but why the hell is my local login/decryption reliant on THEIR login service being up?? Not acceptable.

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