[German]A short note for administrators in companies that use Bitwarden as a password manager in their environment. A change to the backend may cause problems with Bitwarden instances.
Bitwarden is a free open source password management service that is used to store confidential information, such as login data for websites, in an encrypted vault.
German blog reader Julius contacted me by email on July 16, 2025 and wrote that he had just had a problem with their Bitwarden instances in his company environment. The company's password collection was suddenly no longer accessible in the Bitwarden application. If users or administrators tried to access the company's vault, the app would display "Organization disabled" in the vault.
Julius wrote that he then contacted the company's hoster, who hosts Bitwarden for the company. The solution to the problem was to re-initiate the license synchronization with the "company owner". The background: Bitwarden had probably changed the backend. When contacting the blog reader, the host noted that this affected several companies.
Yeah, Bitwarden sent out an email about this in May. It's a note for self-hosted customers, so it sounds like Julius has purchased this service from a company that's self-hosting and reselling the service. The note they sent out was (just a few lines in a monthly email):
Important note for self-hosted customers
If you encounter license validation messages with your organization after recent updates, re-download your cloud license and upload it to your self-hosted server, and your service should continue uninterrupted. Contact support if you have questions.
And it had a link to the Manual Update instructions on this page: https://bitwarden.com/help/licensing-on-premise/