Miscoded Auth Error Returned HTTP 500 for Wrong Passwords, Blocked Release
A bug in CloudWise's login API caused the server to return an HTTP 500 error — typically reserved for server-side failures — whenever users entered wrong passwords, used unregistered emails, or had unconfirmed accounts. The root cause was a function that translated AWS Cognito authentication exceptions without ever setting a status code, causing it to default to 500. Both staging and production environments were affected, and production additionally leaked whether a given email address was registered, introducing a secondary security issue. The miscoded responses polluted monitoring dashboards by making routine login failures indistinguishable from real outages, and also triggered error-level logs for ordinary user mistakes. The bug went undetected in production until an automated end-to-end test gate flagged it during a separate release cycle, blocking version 1.105.0 from being promoted.
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