Image pulls fail with 403 Forbidden, even for public images

Pods suddenly fail to pull images (even public ones) with errors like failed to fetch oauth token ... 403 Forbidden, and nothing changed in our manifests. Why?

Check your Registry Credentials. If any of them is invalid (expired or revoked token, wrong password), pulls can fail for all the registries defined in Registry Credentials, not only the broken one. They’re injected as a pull secret into every pod, so public images are affected too.

Fix: in the Okteto Admin dashboard, open Registry Credentials, verify that every credential is still valid, and update or remove the broken one. Use non-expiring or rotated tokens and track their expiry.

Already-cached images keep working, which can hide the issue for a while.

See Registry Credentials.