An error was encountered while trying to authenticate

  • We are experiencing a very strange problem.

    One member of our team (working out of their house) cannot login to the admin side of the site. When they follow the admin link, they get the unstyled login page (like the stylesheet didn’t load). And when they try to login, they get Error: An error was encountered while trying to authenticate. Please try again.

    Others (me) can login fine.

    We have tried:
    1) Clearing the cache;
    2) Different browsers;
    3) Different machines;
    4) Disabling security plugins (Wordfence)

    Nothing works.

    One note of interest — We have an SSL cert on the site (which I can see), but this person gets a security error indicating there is no cert.

    Any ideas as to what might be happening?

    I have not yet tried reverting to a generic theme, because I can get in fine, so I have to think it has something to do with this person’s setup.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • Could you try if one of this solutions will work?

    – What happens when the person will enter the website with the manual https:// in the URL?
    – Is there an two-steps verification active? (If so, could you deactivate it)?
    – If you open the inspector tool (in Chrome: CTRL + Shift + i) and go to the console tab, are there any errors shown?
    – What happens when you deactivate temporary all the plugins and see if the person can login again?

    Thread Starter jgold723

    (@jgold723)

    Thanks for the suggestions. Here are some answers:

    1) I tried disabling both 2FA and all plugins — no luck;
    2) I have not yet tried forcing https:// — will do;
    3) Checking for errors:
    If I do it from my location, I get no errors at all;
    If the team member in question does this, they get a bunch of “Failure to load resources – 404” type errors

    So… they seem to have some kind of access issue, but I’m not sure what or how to resolve that.

    They do have Internet access and can get into the admin side of other sites we have with the same host.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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