The First Aid Forward viewer inside the AnkiHub add-on is returning ERROR 403 - ACCESS DENIED (“We apologize for the inconvenience, we seem to be having difficulty completing your request”).
It fails the moment I enter my email, before I even get to a password. It was working fine two days ago and nothing has changed on my end.
Links to digital technical support on the error page are unresponsive. FAF works fine in a normal browser; issue seems specific to the embedded viewer in the AnkiHub add‑on.
Things I’ve already tried, with no change:
- Confirmed my AnkiHub premium subscription is active
- AnkiHub add-on and Anki are fully up to date
- Logged into First Aid Forward in a regular browser successfully (so my account/access is fine there)
- Fully quit and restarted Anki multiple times
- Signed out of AnkiHub in the app and signed back in
-Ensured no VPN connection
-Updated my computer
The error message points me to digital technical support and asks me to reference the trace ID:
Trace Id: e435b719f57e1a99d8f4d21678a4c1ef
I’m on macOS. Any help would be appreciated — thank you!
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Thanks for the detailed rundown of what you’ve tried—that’s really helpful.
Because:
- You can log into First Aid Forward in a normal browser with the same email,
- The error appears immediately after entering your email (before password),
- It was working recently and nothing changed on your end,
this strongly suggests an issue on the First Aid Forward / McGraw‑Hill side or with the embedded login flow that AnkiHub uses, rather than something specific to your Anki setup or subscription.
At this point there isn’t anything more you can safely fix locally (you’ve already covered the usual suspects like VPN, updates, re‑logins, etc.).
What I recommend next
-
Contact First Aid / digital technical support using the link shown in the error page and include:
- The full error text,
- The Trace Id:
e435b719f57e1a99d8f4d21678a4c1ef,
- That this occurs only via the AnkiHub embedded First Aid Forward viewer in Anki, not in a regular browser.
-
Please also share any reply you get from their support here in this thread.
That will help the AnkiHub team confirm whether:
- there’s a temporary outage / block on their side, or
- something changed in their embedded-login requirements that AnkiHub needs to update for.
-
In the meantime, the best workaround is:
- Continue using First Aid Forward in your regular browser, and
- Switch between Anki and the browser manually for now when you need to reference FAF content.
I don’t see any existing forum reports of this exact 403/trace‑ID error in the FAF viewer yet, so you may be among the first to hit a new issue. If you’d like, I can also flag this topic to the AnkiHub team so they’re aware there may be a problem with the embedded FAF integration.
Unfortunately, the links shown on the error are unresponsive, nothing happens when I try to access these links. I think notifying AnkiHub may be a good idea.
Hello,
I would be happy to help. 
From what I can see of the image you shared, the error appears to be on FirstAid’s side. I see that there is a URL there included to contact what I presume is their support service; have you tried contacting them?
In the meantime I’ll try to touch base with one of our developers to make sure nothing is amiss on our end, but my hunch is that this looks to be a service error with the McGraw Hill website, rather than anything I’m immediately able to tackle on our end
If you can, I’d reach out to FA via the link they’ve provided and see if they’re experiencing any known issues or outages, and I’ll see about conversing with our team and making sure everything is squared away on our end. If it’s something on their end, it will likely be that whatever adjustments need to be made would have to happen on their side of things I imagine.
