Knowledge Base articles suddenly unaccessible to most users.

[kbukg]

Hi, I'm hoping someone can help. Overnight it seems, end users lost access to KB articles. They cannot access them via direct link, they cannot access them through the front end (going through Knowledge), and they cannot access via individual article link either. It is also not coming up under related search results when users are on a request screen. 

The only people who can access them are Knowledge Managers. Has anyone seen this before? 

[Aerin · Accepted solution]

We got a notice on September 4 that SN had changed the user access settings on our instance to close a potential gap. They set the system property glide.knowman.block_access_with_no_user_criteria to “true”. Check out the article KB1123580 in ServiceNow support for more details about checking and configuring your access.

I don't know for sure, but maybe worth checking if this is related?

[kbukg]

AHA!! This absolutely sounds like it could be the issue. I sent it to our DEV team last night and voila, it was fixed this morning. They have not confirmed if this was the fix or if they just happened to find the answer at the same time, but I am going to mark it as the solution, because I assume it to be. THANK YOU!!

[Aerin]

You're welcome! Gotta love those devs who like to keep the magic to themselves. LOL

[Kim27]

If it isn't the issue that Aerin suggested, then perhaps your SN admins did a clean-up of roles or groups that caused this to occur. 

Do you have the ability to run user criteria diagnostics? Open any affected published article, scroll down to the bottom and you should see it under Related Links. This should help you identify why they cannot see the articles.