Update: Sep 29: LastPass says they have fixed this bug, below is their response. We still find the fact that some passwords automatically get deleted without user intervention or notification is a very scary design.

“From the [redacted] folder, the 4 items we found to be deleted from last week were all items without a URL. We also noticed something else, these deleted items did not have any data stored in the password or username fields (don’t worry, this data is all encrypted, so we can’t see the actual values, only that it is empty or not). This seems to confirm our understanding of the issue and we have released a fix for it. This fix is server side–no action is required on your end.

Here is what is happening:

Expected Behavior:

If you have an item in your Vault that contains a URL but the username and password fields are blank and a new item is saved with a username and password at the same URL, this new item will “replace” the old one by deleting it. The purpose of this is to help reduce redundancy in the case where someone wanted to create a “bookmark” item in the LastPass Vault that only contains a URL but no credentials, but then decide to save the credentials for it later.

Unexpected Behavior:

What you are experiencing is not expected because these accounts do not have URLs. Items without URLs should be skipped in this logic, but is not. Due to this bug, when you add credentials to an item with a blank URL, it attempts to replace another item with a blank URL as it deems those “URLs” as the same.

Something for consideration as well: we noticed that these have data in the notes section. Notes are currently not included in this logic. However, we may want to consider adding it.”

Update Sep 27: We were contacted by LastPass who said this is not considered a “known issue” and they are working with us to fix it. As of today, the issue is not fixed. We notified them on Aug 15, but apparently the issue wasn’t escalated to the proper people.

As an I.T. consulting firm, we have to keep track of lots of passwords for our clients. We have to share them with the client, their contractors, and anybody else who needs it. After having a lacklustre experience with the early versions of Dashlane, we were excited to try LastPass Enterprise. Overall, we’ve been pretty happy, and we’ve been using it for almost exactly one year, but several months ago an insidious bug appeared which shows no signs of going away: LastPass silently deletes your passwords, and LastPass knows this.

LastPass has a lot of functionality which is exciting and great. We love the interface upgrades it gets every few months, the “security check” feature where it compares your passwords to other passwords you have, the zero-knowledge encryption, fine-grained user controls, it’s all great. But this software’s main and only real goal is store passwords securely, and it can’t do that.

We first noticed the problem of disappearing passwords in August. Passwords we added didn’t show up on other machines. As we investigated further, we found that a number of passwords had been deleted and showed up in our “deleted items” folder, which automatically purges itself every 30 days. We opened a support ticket with LastPass and almost immediately received confirmation that this was a “known issue”. We expected this to be fixed in a matter of a week, or a few days since it’s was such a show-stopping issue, but this never happened. Here we are over a month later and our passwords are still getting deleted. You’d think they would throw their entire development team at a known issue that deletes users passwords at random, but apparently this month they were more concerned about “small changes” to their UI. Is this incompetence? Negligence?

Despite multiple requests to LastPass and reaching out to them on twitter, LastPass has simply not fixed this bug, and there seems to be no fix in sight. As our subscription nears its end, we will most certainly be deleting our account, and want other people who trust their most secure information to them to know what a risk they are taking.

What have your experiences with LastPass been? At the end of the day, we’re just glad we kept backups instead of trusting LastPass blindly.