I am very new to posting here. I did not find any topic related to mine but i must confess I am a bit overwhelmed with all the information available here and may very well have overlooked something. I am not a native english speaker.
I self host bitwarden on a bookworm VPS to manage my passwords and today, my instance won’t start with messages saying `Error response from daemon: Container cannot be connected to network endpoints: docker_default, docker_public`.
Here is what I did to end up in this situation.
Every now and then, i upgrade my system and instance with the following commands:
apt upgrade
./bitwarden.sh updateself
./bitwarden.sh update
The system upgrade upgraded the following docker related packages:
- docker-buildx-plugin → 0.31.1-1~debian.12~bookworm
- docker-compose-plugin → 5.1.0-1~debian.12~bookworm
- docker.io → 20.10.24+dfsg1-1+deb12u1+b3
The upgradeself command updated from 2025.12.1 to 2026.2.0
And the latter update command said: Error response from daemon: client version 1.53 is too new. Maximum supported API version is 1.41.
It is possible that the whole thing have been ending up with this message for quite a while now and that just today I noticed it. I don’t know. Anyway, at this stage, I believe that my bitwarden instance has not been updated but is still running fine on version 2025.12.1 (unless the upgrade was already failing before in which case I have no idea what version of bitwarden I was running and have no way to find out as far as I know).
I know that I can enforce the 1.41 API by setting DOCKER_API_VERSION=1.41 so I did that and ran ./bitwarden.sh update again. New images were pulled, as usual, but when starting, the following error occurred:
```
[+] pull 90/90
Image ghcr.io/bitwarden/events:2026.2.0 Pulled 28.1s
Image ghcr.io/bitwarden/attachments:2026.2.0 Pulled 25.3s
Image ghcr.io/bitwarden/notifications:2026.2.0 Pulled 43.2s
Image ghcr.io/bitwarden/api:2026.2.0 Pulled 30.2s
Image ghcr.io/bitwarden/icons:2026.2.0 Pulled 38.0s
Image ghcr.io/bitwarden/sso:2026.2.0 Pulled 38.3s
Image ghcr.io/bitwarden/mssql:2026.2.0 Pulled 4.7ss
Image ghcr.io/bitwarden/web:2026.2.0 Pulled 46.2s
Image ghcr.io/bitwarden/admin:2026.2.0 Pulled 41.5s
Image ghcr.io/bitwarden/identity:2026.2.0 Pulled 43.7s
Image ghcr.io/bitwarden/nginx:2026.2.0 Pulled 46.1s
[+] up 5/11
Network… Created 0.3s
Network… Created 0.7s
⠋ Contain… Creating 0.0s
✘ Contain… Error response from daemon: Container cannot be connected to network endpoints: docker_default, docker_public 0.0s
⠋ Contain… Creating 0.0s
✘ Contain… Error response from daemon: Container cannot be connected to network endpoints: docker_public, docker_default 0.0s
⠋ Contain… Creating 0.0s
⠋ Contain… Creating 0.0s
⠋ Contain… Creating 0.0s
⠋ Contain… Creating 0.0s
✘ Contain… Error response from daemon: Container cannot be connected to network endpoints: docker_default, docker_public 0.0s
```
At this point, I figured I should abort my upgrading process and take some time to think about what is going on. But I am unable to downgrade to 2025.12.1 (ie. download bitwarden.sh version 2025.12.1 from Release Version 2025.12.1 · bitwarden/self-host · GitHub and use it to call update). I have the exact same symptoms. I tried to go back in time as far as 2025.6.0 with no difference.
So here I am asking for help. My priority is to have my instance running again. I will troubleshoot why the upgrade fails later.
Thanks for your help.