Git: Suddenly receiving "You need to verify your account" 403 error

Nathan Caldwell

We have a custom software that periodically checks a Bitbucket repository via https. It always uses the same user and password.

Out of nowhere, it has begun receiving this error when attempting to talk to the remote:

remote: You need to verify your account before logging in. Please check your inbox for the verification email.
fatal: unable to access '<remote url>': The requested URL returned error: 403

(replaced actual remote url with brackets)

Unfortunately, the person who created this account left the company long ago, and I don't know the email associated with the account.

Questions:

• Does anyone know why this may have started? I believe it began today, after being reliable for years.
• Any tips for resolving this issue? 

Thank you!

Nathan Caldwell

Here is the resolution: 

• Finding the email associated with the account
  • As it turned out, this was super easy for our Bitbucket admin to do.
• Why this started happening on 10/28
  • According to Atlassian support, we were seeing this error because Bitbucket says you can only go so long without logging in to the account before they will stop letting you pull and push using that credential. 
  • We had gone an unknown--but probably very long--amount of time without signing in.

There was an additional complication for us when we tried to sign in to Bitbucket:

• When I tried to sign in to Bitbucket as prompted by the error message received by Git, I discovered that Bitbucket was saying "We sent a signup link to you" instead of letting us log in.
• Atlassian support explained that this was actually Atlassian sending a signup link, not Bitbucket. Basically we had created this account in Bitbucket a very long time ago, and at that time you could create a Bitbucket account independently of creating an Atlassian account.
• At some point since we created that account in Bitbucket, Atlassian made it so that you had to have an Atlassian account in order to access Bitbucket.
• Once we followed the signup link and created an Atlassian account for our KetraCM email account, we were able to sign in to Bitbucket. 

After that, we were able to "verify" the account. Then we could pull from the repo again using the existing remote URL.

Thanks to Philipe Trinh on the support team for working through this with us!