We recently ran into a nasty issue where every video link on our FTJ Media platform suddenly started returning a 403 Forbidden error right after running a git pull upgrade on the codebase. If you are seeing 403s on all your video URLs after an update, this post walks through what happened, how we tracked it down, and what you can check to fix it.
Symptoms
After the upgrade:
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All public video pages loaded, but the actual video file URLs returned 403 Forbidden.
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The problem affected every video link, not just new uploads.
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The web server and PHP logs did not initially show a clear PHP error, just access denials on the video files.
If your users can see the site but every player fails with a 403, you are likely dealing with a permission, path, or security rule problem rather than a broken PHP script.
What fixed it for us
In our case, the problem was triggered by changes introduced in the latest code combined with existing server rules. Once we aligned the configuration with the new code and verified file permissions, the 403s immediately disappeared.
