Dockerhub Down Fixed : Error Response from Login Attempt to Failed With 401 Unauthorized

Getting a “401 Unauthorized” when attempting to login/pull from Docker Hub generally means your credentials (or tokens) aren’t accepted, or Docker’s registry is rejecting the request.

Below are possible causes + steps to fix (“DockerHub Down” isn’t really a thing often, but the service can have outages).

🔍 Possible Causes

• Wrong or expired username / password / token

• You’re using a limited-scope token (e.g. read-only) and Docker doesn’t accept it in your scenario

• The Docker client has cached invalid credentials

• Docker Hub (or the registry) is having a temporary outage or degraded performance

• Registry URL or endpoint is wrong (e.g. mistyped or using old v1 API)

• Network proxies/firewalls interfering with the authentication flow

• Internal Docker config issues (config.json)

• The registry backend (if self‑hosted) is misconfigured for auth realms / token handling

✅ Steps to Fix / Troubleshoot

Try these in order until one resolves it.

1. Log out / clear credentials, then login fresh

   docker logout
docker login


   This clears any stale cached credentials that may be rejected.
   (This is a known workaround when credentials changed but Docker still holds old ones)

2. Use a valid personal access token (PAT) instead of password

   • If your Docker Hub account uses 2FA, you typically can’t use your password for CLI auth; you’ll need a token.

   • Make sure the token has the proper scopes (read/pull, or more) to work with Docker CLI.

3. Check token scope / permissions

   • If you used a read-only token or limited-scope token, try generating one with broader permissions (read + write or full) and see if login works. Some users found that limited tokens caused “invalid token / unauthorized” errors.

   • If using Docker Hub’s token system, check that the repository is accessible to your account.

4. Verify registry endpoint / URL is correct

   Sometimes people accidentally change or misname registry endpoints (e.g. registry-1.docker.io/v2 vs index.docker.io) or use HTTP instead of HTTPS. Ensure you’re targeting the proper URL.

5. Check for Docker Hub outage / status

   • Visit Docker’s status page (e.g. status.docker.com) to see if there is an authentication / registry outage.

   • The error “Image pull returns 401 Unauthorized” was reported as an incident before.

   • If Docker Hub is actually down or degraded, you may have to wait until it’s resolved.

6. Inspect your ~/.docker/config.json

   • After login, Docker stores auth tokens in ~/.docker/config.json. Make sure the file is valid (no syntax errors, no malformed entries).

   • Remove obsolete or malformed credentials.

7. Check network / firewall / proxy

   • If you’re behind a corporate proxy or firewall, it may block or interfere with the authentication handshake.

   • Try from a different network (e.g. mobile hotspot) to see if the issue is network-specific.

8. Try with verbose / debug modes

   Run:

   docker --debug login


   or

   DOCKER_CLI_TRACE=1 docker login


   to get more details about what’s failing in the HTTP / token exchange.

9. Wait and retry

   If it’s a transient outage or glitch in Docker Hub, retrying after some minutes or an hour might succeed.

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