Password manager LastPass Inc. has suffered an outage that kept some users from accessing their accounts and hence their passwords.

Reports of LastPass users being unable to access their account first emerged over the weekend on social media. Exactly what was involved with the outage is unknown, and it didn’t helped that LastPass initially denied there was an issue. It later said there was, without publicizing the disclosure.

pic.twitter.com/n2ggS5DWuS

— Ryan Dunlop (K0UJX) (@Piper_at_Dawn) January 17, 2020

LastPass has two Twitter accounts, its main @LastPass account and its @LastPassStatus account. On its main account, it outright denies any issues, saying to a user that “our engineering team has checked the status of our service and they cannot find any issues on our side. This is why nothing has been posted to our service status page.”

But on its Status page, later, it states, “RESOLVED: After a thorough investigation, we’ve identified and resolved the login errors caused by a bug in a recent release impacting a small set of users. This has been resolved and all services are now functional.”

The company did go on to say in a blog post today that “over the weekend, a small group of LastPass users may have experienced error messages when attempting to log into their accounts. The LastPass team identified the isolated issue, confirmed it was not a widespread outage, and it has been completely resolved. All services are now working, and no user action is needed.”

You’re right. I’m giving them until tomorrow. If they don’t respond I’m cancelling my acct and starting the arduous task of rebuilding my password management on 1Password. I think LastPass was bought by LogMeIn. The quality of their service has dropped unbelievably. https://t.co/a9p80irXbM

— lulublu22 (@lulubluboo) January 19, 2020

Companies experience outages and issues, so LastPass can’t be knocked for that. However, denying its existence and then not admitting later that it was wrong and there was an issue on its main social media accounts, not just Twitter but Facebook as well, is not good form.

Transparency should be at the top of the company’s list given its previous issues. The company was famously hacked in 2015 and has suffered other issues since then, including a vulnerability that exposed user passwords in 2017 and more recently in September had to patch a bug that allowed malicious websites to steal login credentials.

LastPass remains popular, rated the most popular password manager as of July, but popularity doesn’t give companies an excuse to not be upfront with their users. Password managers are a dime a dozen and there is no shortage of competitors to LastPass.

Image: hunter0405/Flickr