Authentication failed: WordPress ran into an issue. Error code 500: There has been a critical error on this website.

Hi @carolineM,

Welcome to the Community! 🎉

I did some digging into our internal notes, and it seems like the 500 error is caused by the plug-in called The Events Calendar and The Events Calendar PRO. Some users found success authenticating when the said plug-in was turned off. If you don’t have that plug-in, I suggest checking the plugins that you may have and turning some of them off.

Hopefully, this helps! 😊

we are having the same issue, Zapier is no longer working on my wordpress site. 

edit -

Refer A Friend for WooCommerce by WPGens

is causing Zapier to break

Hey there @NxtWin Ben,

Thanks for letting us know!

There are a few other plugins that may interfere with the WordPress integration. These include Jetpack, Wordfence Security, iThemes Security, WP Rocket, JWT Auth, WP-SpamShield, WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click, Limit Login Attempts Reloaded, SiteGuard WP Plugin, IP Geo Block, WPS Hide Login, reCaptcha by BestWebSoft, and Profile Builder.

Please make sure to turn off these plugins when authenticating to Zapier to avoid any potential issues.

Let us know if you have any questions or concerns. We're here to help! 😊

Thanks everyone, I have a few of these plugins. I use them regularly so I won’t just switch them off which is a shame as it was handy to have stuff automated using zapier. Not a deal breaker though, so I’ll just disable zapier until a fix is found. 

I'm the user with the Events Calendar issue that was reported months ago. 

For everyone's reference, Modern Tribe reports that the issue is that the Zapier plugin, which hasn't been touched in the last three major WordPress updates, has an old, vulnerable version of the Firebase/JWT library in the plugin.

When other developers implement the updated, secured version of the library, it causes the break.

So, it boils down the the fact that this is not a "limitation" of the plugin, but rather Zapier not correctly maintaining the plugin for WordPress. 

I've been using Zapier for 9 years and have it connected to roughly 50 different apps and many websites we develop for clients to provide automation. Our cost for the service has skyrocketed and they continually refuse to maintain a plugin to connect to the platform that runs 43% of websites in the world.

I'm confused by Zapier's statement that their plugin not being maintained is an inconvenience (deal and business breaker) and that they won't even commit to fixing the issue ("might be developed"). In their email to me, and in this thread, they don't commit to a secure, working WordPress plugin. 

Look closely at the list of plug-ins they admit the plugin doesn't work with. It's some of the lost popular, respected plug-ins in the WordPress world. 

If they're not going to commit to making a viable WordPress plugin, they should just admit it so those of use that use WordPress can move on to another automation provider that will support us. 

I've loved and preached the value of Zapier for years. My disappointment in their ability to service WordPress is beyond words. I keep hoping they will rectify this situation before I have to commit tremendous resources to rebuilding our automations on another platform like Pably, Zoho Flow or a combination. 

Hit this problem today.  From the list above, I thought it might be iThemes Security Pro that was conflicting, but disabling that didn’t help.  So I tried disabling 20 other non-essential (but well-known) plugins on the website in question, but Zapier still threw an error when I tried to connect.

So I gave up and will go see if Make can handle this job instead.

hope ai can write a plugin for them which will not conflict with this long list, very disappointed 

As for now, zapier plugin almost completely stopped working. 

From all of the plugins above (that might have prevented zapier plugin from connecting) I had only 1 on. Disabled it several times. Still doesn’t work. 

Please, please, please, upgrade this plugin. 

Wordpress has hundreds of millions of users. 

You’re loosing millions of clients if you don’t fix that 

The Zapier and Woocomerce stops working, error 500 !  but no one cares, subscription paid, fine for them 

Hey folks! 👋

@PearlCityMedia, @squareeye, @egoregor, @Michal Kankowski and @Pepson - I’m so sorry we missed your messages here previously!

I’ve just come across the thread here and from what I can see on this end it that the feature request Ken mentioned was specifically around updating the FireBase/JWT library to 6.0+ to resolve incompatibility issues that were flagged for the The Events Calendar and The Events Calendar PRO plugins specifically. That feature request was implemented back on April 30th, 2024 so it should have resolved any similar incompatibility issue with other plugins that were using the same library. 

The other plugins that were mentioned (Jetpack, Wordfence Security, iThemes Security, WP Rocket, JWT Auth, WP-SpamShield, WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click, Limit Login Attempts Reloaded, SiteGuard WP Plugin, IP Geo Block, WPS Hide Login, reCaptcha by BestWebSoft, and Profile Builder) I believe have been known to have security features/settings that can block Zapier’s access to WordPress and in turn can cause similar authentication issues when connecting your WordPress account to Zapier. So it’s often recommended to temporarily turn them off one by one to determine which plugin is blocking Zapier’s access. However, it’s not just plugins that can block access as sometimes the security settings on the web server itself can block access. So I’d suggest also reaching out to your website’s administrator/hosting provider to confirm whether there are any security settings or features that might be blocking Zapier’s access. 

And I’d recommend reaching out to our Support team about the authentication errors you’re seeing when connecting to your WordPress account. They’ll be able to dig into the logs for your account which may provide further details or insights as to what might be causing the authentication issues. You can get in touch with them here: https://zapier.com/app/get-help

Hope this helps to all pointed in the right direction. If there’s anything else we can help with in the meantime do let us know! 🙂