LastPass launches investigation after users report ‘major outage’

20 Jan 2020

Image: © Burlingham/Stock.adobe.com

LastPass customers reported receiving error messages when they attempted to log in to their accounts on the password management platform.

This morning (20 January), password management platform LastPass confirmed that it was actively investigating reports from customers experiencing issues and receiving error messages at login.

LastPass tweeted: “We are aware of and actively investigating reports from some LastPass customers who are experiencing issues and receiving errors when attempting to log in. At this time no service issues have been identified.”

According to Twitter users, issues had reportedly been occurring for days, with a number of users claiming to have been unable to log into their accounts or unable to autofill passwords since Friday (17 January).

ZDNet noted that the complaints continued on other forums, such as Reddit and DownDetector. The most commonly reported error message said: “An error has occurred while contacting the LastPass server. Please try again later.”

This afternoon, LastPass said that its engineers had identified an issue and were working towards a resolution.

“We have confirmed that the issue has been resolved completely and all systems are 100pc operational at this time,” the company later added.

“We will conduct an internal investigation of this issue and make appropriate improvements to our systems to help prevent or minimise future recurrence.”

The company tweeted that the login errors had been caused by “a bug in a recent release impacting a small set of users”.

Commenting on the outage, one Reddit user said: “The worst part is not the outage itself, but their (lack of) response. You gotta be able to trust your password manager, and now I can’t.”

Another LastPass user tweeted that they had been fearing a security issue: “So everyone having the exact same issue is coincidental? And the fact that I can’t login from multiple devices, multiple browsers and multiple ISPs? Bullshit. Either data corruption and people’s vaults are corrupted or you are experiencing a security incident.”

Updated, 3.30pm, 20 January 2020: This article was amended to include a status update from LastPass.

Kelly Earley was a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com