After upgarding to 2026.4.0 my Kasa power strip is disconnected. I get a prompt that says “Authentication expired” to put my login info again but it doesn’t work with the below error - the login info works fine on https://www.tplinkcloud.com/admin.php
“Unable to authenticate: Device response did not match our challenge on ip 192.168.86.29, check that your e-mail and password (both case-sensitive) are correct.”
I have in the past had a similar problem with their smart plugs Something to do with the fact that these devices share passwords between themselves. I had to turn off ALL the other devices then re-add the offending device. It then accepted the password. Embarrassingly it is mentioned in the installation instructions Hope this your problem as it is an easy fix.
All my other devices were off when I tried to add it, do I need to unplug everything too?
They need to be powered off so either wall switch off or unplugged
Yup, unplugging everything, resetting the device, and rebooting HA worked
That’s good to hear!
hi, could you clarify what you mean by ‘resetting the device’ here? did you have to remove them from kasa/tapo and then reconfigure? all my power strips stopped working 2 weeks ago
I held down the reset button on the device that was having the issue
darn. I’ve tried unplugging all the strips, resetting them all, turning 3rd-party compatibility off and back on, changing my password, resetting them all several more times, creating a new account; nothing worked 
upgrading to 2026.4.4 fixed it 
edit: that worked for 2/3 of my smart strips. the last one still fails but I can connect just fine with uvx --from python-kasa kasa --username XXXXXXXXXXXXX --password XXXXXXXXXXXXX --host bedroom-power.iot.haley.casa so hopefully just next time home assistant bumps the library version it will start working 