Do not update any bitwarden client until you can update vaultwarden
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2026
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If anyone's Firefox auto updated like mine you can uninstall the extension, go to the Bitwarden extension page on the Firefox website and manually install the old version. Only needed if you can't update vaultwarden right away.
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(8 replies)
I found this comment on what happened by dani-garcia, one of the main devs:
The short version is that around 8-ish years ago, Bitwarden changed the way the vault items were structured, and Vaultwarden added some backwards compatibility fields to ensure both old and new versions of the clients worked.
These backwards compatibility fields were supposed to be a temporary measure, but for at least the next three years the clients still required them, until we eventually forgot to keep track of them. At some point between 2021 and today, the clients stopped requiring these backwards compatibility fields, but Vaultwarden was still sending them.
This wasn't a problem until Bitwarden decided to use the backwards compatibility fields in a completely different way, which caused the clients to crash.
Found here: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/discussions/7473
There’s a reason you don’t do things like that…
Apparently nobody in that software team has heard about Knight Capital. They reused a flag and that coupled with a deployment failure that only lasted ~45 minutes caused an over 400 million dollar loss nearly bankrupting the entire company. Ultimately they ended up combining with another company.
The immediate cause of the incident was a deployment failure that left one of eight servers running outdated code, creating an inconsistency in how the system interpreted incoming instructions. The new software reused a flag associated with a legacy function known as “Power Peg,” which had been disabled but not removed from the codebase, and on the unpatched server this flag activated obsolete logic that continuously generated child orders in response to parent orders that the system did not correctly recognize as already filled.
I hadn't heard of this one before, thanks for posting.
Edit: this website is very strange. The article is dated 5th June 2019 and the other "case studies" are dated to look like they've been writing regularly since 2019 up until now. But the article reads like LLM output, and the waybackmachine has no record of this article before December 2025, and no record of the domain name henricodolfing.ch before April 2025. The whois database says that the domain was registered in January 2025. So are they really trying to launder slop by back-dating it to make it look like it was written before LLMs existed? Fuck.
Thanks so much for the PSA. I'm currently on vacation without any chance to update Vaultwarden but need access to it via the Bitwarden client. Just disabled the auto update in time. I wish I could vote this twice.
Enjoy your vacation! ~
i'm in shadowzone's house right now and vaultwarden's working great :3
I do love docker + a front end like dockge.
Saw this post, switched to my browser, clicked three buttons; vaultwarden is now updated. Didn't even move my lazy ass off the couch. (I'm on my phone)
Thanks for the PSA! :)
I love podman quadlets, I didn't do anything and it updated itself 😁
I run watchtower on a cron schedule. It had already fired for today, so it wouldn't have run again until tomorrow. I could have waited, but manual is just as easy.
Be aware that watchtowerr is not updated anymore and due to the nature of having access to the socket is a security risk.
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I can recommend Arcane as a front end. I switched over all my services this last week from multiple dockges to a single arcane (+agents). It's looking pretty sweet now. Cleans up a lot of bookmarks too 😆
Homepage is my main front end/landing page for reaching/monitoring all my services; but I've got both my dockge instances linked together as well, so all my services show up in both.
wow didn't know dockge could do that!
I was looking for a simple solution like that, thank you kind stranger!
I've been leery about bitwarden client updates since the posts awhile back about the new(ish) PE/VC c suite person.
I'm not saying those are related in any way other than the fact that I intentionally haven't updated my clients to the latest yet and for once it worked out for me :)
Its a lot of coincidences
As soon as that news came down I immediately went to my extension and turned off auto-updates. Glad I did now!
Just did the update of vaultwarden. Had to log out and log back again in bitwarden on my browser. On the phone it seems to just have worked. Thank you for the PSA :)
Wow! Thanks for the PSA!
Ps. I notice your msn avatar. I'm busy with https://retromessenger.com/. Coming soon for free!
Would love this to work with Signal and Matrix!
Yah that's possible. I just implemented telegram for now. But depending on the open api like matrix should work for sure as well. Has signal also an open client api?
The whole client is open source, but idk if you can simply call the API with a token for a linked device or something. Pretty sure Signal doesn't want "chatbots" on their networks and it might be against ToS.
uhm.. yeah I need to look into that. with Telegram, I needed to register a special "telegram app token" and on top of that you still need to login with your own credentials. But I'm just using the official tdlib for that.
Very nice, I even considered using escargot to patch the old clients but then realized it's not a great idea security wise
Yeah escargot just doesn't do it for me. I want to keep using the existing chat network I use daily. But just giving back the MSN vibes.
I created it using gtk4. So it's cross platform as well. Meaning Linux native. Which I also wanted.
Noticed that as well with our selfhosted instance at work and wondered what the deal was.
Guess I now know why.
Thank you for the PSA good friend!
Thanks, probably saved me a lot of headache on my laptop browsers. Fortunately, I don't use the official Bitwarden client on android partly because this seems to keep happening.
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Was wondering why it suddenly was stuck loading, thanks!
Yeah I updated bitearden yesterday and my vault would not load any items. Glad this bug is already fixed!
Thanks for the PSA, I got hit before any of this was live
Thank you for this. I thought I was going insane. Time to turn auto updates off
Per the vault warden release notes:
We strongly advice to update as soon as possible.
With the vulnerabilities being patched these days, it seems ill asvised to disable automatic updates for something as critical as a password manager.
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(1 replies)
The packaged Debian version did not get updated yet.
Tale as old as time.
It did get already updated though 😅
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