How Selenium + Chrome Locked Me Out of My Own Windows Account
I ran into one of those "bugs" that initially looks completely unrelated to your code. My Windows account started getting locked randomly. The weird part was that I knew the password was correct. Sometimes I could log in normally, and sometimes Windows would suddenly say that the account was locked. At first I assumed it was some Windows issue. It wasn't. The clue: Event ID 4625 After checking…
Selenium application was causing login issues for Windows account
A reporter experienced random Windows account lockouts while running a Selenium application that started multiple Chrome instances in parallel. The issue was not with the password, but with ChromeDriver creating temporary Chrome profiles for each Selenium session. Chrome performs Windows authentication checks that can call the LogonUser API using an empty password, resulting in failed logon attempts recorded in the Windows Security event log.
Windows has a lockout threshold that, when reached, locks the account. The reporter confirmed the issue by checking Event ID 4625 in the Windows Security log, which pointed to chrome.exe generating failed authentication attempts. A temporary workaround involved disabling account lockout, but the better solution was to give each Selenium worker its own persistent Chrome profile, avoiding repeated first-run initialization and multiple failed logon attempts.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
