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Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

Just a few hours ago a pretty well-known site was telling me my password was wrong. The same one I'd copy pasted and logged in with for years from my password manager, including as recently as within the past 24h. I tried their app and it logged me in just fine. This wasn't the first time I'd had such issues with the site. Why do these happen? No idea, they must just hate me.

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I had this with Duolingo. Their login fails if the browser can’t connect to recaptcha.net. But it just shows a generic “incorrect username/password” message.

In my case I'm pretty darn sure it's something on their backend. Some race condition or lock or something that prevents login while stuff is being updated. The most frustrating part is the gaslighting, not the failure.

Or it could be bad UX, displaying the same error message for two different errors.

(Not saying that simplifying several errors into one message is always bad. I think it's reasonable to just return a 500 without any info for everything that's caused by an unexpected exception on the backend.)

Or a backend cache miss

Ah, this is a good debug. I wonder how many times this is silently happening on other sites?

Very common, the first thing I check when this kind of error pops up.

Well I am glad I am not alone. It is a strange feeling to know you are right and the computer saying no making you doubt yourself. Like, my first reaction is usually to write the password in clear text and copy pasting it to rule out keyboard issues ...

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