"Unauthorised error" 401 appears randomly for successfully logged in users
Who is this article for?
Users encountering error 401 while working normally in the application
No special permissions are required to resolve the issue.
You might find that during normal use of the software you are sent to a page showing the message "unauthorised error".
This article explains what causes the issue and a workaround.
The problem affects v1.15 and earlier.
Issue
You:
- Log in successfully
- Work for a while, with no problem
- See on the screen the message unauthorised error, with error-401 in the address bar:
After a while, you can log back in again and continue to work as normal.
The cause is that two components within the system do not correctly communicate with each other once one of the internal tokens expires, causing the application to think that you are suddenly no longer authorised.
Workarounds
To log back in straight away
You are able to log back in again after a time, but the exact duration cannot be predicted and may be some hours.
You should be able to log back in immediately with the following workaround:
- The URL for the error page is like https://instance-tenant.stack01.arc.ideagen.com/error-401
- In the address bar of your browser, delete the text error-401
- Replace it with logout, so that it looks like https://instance-tenant.stack01.arc.ideagen.com/logout
- Press enter
- Close your browser, and then log back in to the application
Minimise the chances of this happening
You can minimise the chance of this happening by:
- Keeping a session length to less than one hour
- Logging out at the end of a session:
- Click on the circle containing your initials:
- Click the Log out button:
- Click on the circle containing your initials: