Cannot log into XMPP account (‘Unbekannter Rechner’)

[Mæstro]

I was connected to my Jabber account, an xmpp.social address, when suddenly, about twelve hours ago, I was disconnected from it in Pidgin. The error message has persisted to the present time. In the buddy list, it displays ‘ maemae@xmpp.social abgemeldet: Unbekannter Rechner, literally ‘[my account name] logged out: unknown computer’, which is mysterious and unhelpful. I cannot find relevant discussions of the error message online. There are two buttons: Konto bearbeiten (edit account) and Verbindung wiederherstellen (restore connexion). The latter loads for a split second before returning the error message. Trying to log into Pidgin from different VPN servers known to work has no effect. If I try logging in using Conversejs, which worked a few days ago, the browser client just loads until it times out. The Hookipa website itself is up, suggesting this is not server downtime. What is going on, and how can I right it?

[Moonchild]

Sounds to me like the XMPP server has started tying your account to specific devices and is refusing the connection because it doesn't recognize the device you're using as authorized for the account. I'd raise this issue with the server operators and see what they say.

[Mæstro]

I will keep your diagnosis in mind if future if this kind of problem should ever recur, but the problem appears to have taken care of itself. Tonight, without having done anything different, I could log in as normal. This day-long outage was not mirrored, as past ones were, by my host’s website shutting down. This suggests that I need a better way to tell whether the XMPP server is down than checking the web server.