If you got the automatic updates on the bitwarden clients, they will show an empty vault if you are selfhosting vaultwarden.
It seems to be an accidental bug in the bitwarden clients that are assuming that they’re talking with official servers
It’s fixed with the latest release of the vaultwarden server that was published a few minutes ago
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 :)
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
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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
Lmao there it is
Downvoters: You all know just as well as I do that this was no “accident”. Private equity always pulls this shit. Learn how to recognize patterns.
Do not update any bitwarden client until you can update vaultwarden
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.
Switching to Passbolt right now. I have the feeling this is the beginning of the enshitification of Bitwarden.
Such bugs have already appeared in the past. It’s only logical that this happens from time to time, as the creators of bitwarden don’t test the compatobility with 3rd party servers.
What is important is that they’re not deliberately blocking vaultwarden.
The mark of a quality developer is not the lack of problems, but the way they respond to them. Any project in active development for a long time is going to run into breaking issues from time to time just because technical debt accrues and memories are short.
The ability to fix a problem, publicly own up to the cause/fix and work to prevent future issues like it are the best we can ask for.
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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.
which client do you use on android?
Keyguard. It’s not perfect and makes money from the paid version for syncing changes back to the server as well as offline editing that will then sync when you’re back online. But it was worth it back when I bought it, and it has never broken so far.
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.
The packaged Debian version did not get updated yet.
Tale as old as time.
It did get already updated though 😅
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.
