[Bug]: Confluence Cloud attachment/image downloads return 401 (legacy /download/attachments endpoint removed)

[pshiko]

Summary

On Confluence Cloud, attachment/image download tools fail: confluence_get_page_images returns downloaded: 0 with every image "Fetch failed", and confluence_download_attachment / confluence_download_content_attachments return 401.

Root cause

The tools follow the attachment's _links.download (and the v2 attachment downloadLink), which points to the legacy /wiki/download/attachments/{id}/{file} path. Atlassian has deprecated and removed that endpoint platform-wide on Cloud (changelog CHANGE-2735 / "Deprecation of /download/attachments/ APIs"). It now returns 401 for API-token / scoped-token auth, while metadata endpoints keep returning 200. The v2 Attachment API is metadata-only and its downloadLink is the same removed /download/ path, so it is not a binary-download replacement.

Repro

• Confluence Cloud, API-token (basic) auth.
• confluence_get_page_images on a page that has images.
• Result: total_images: N, downloaded: 0, all Fetch failed; logs show 401 ... /wiki/download/attachments/....

Working endpoint

The v1 REST endpoint /rest/api/content/{pageId}/child/attachment/{attachmentId}/download is NOT in the deprecation list and returns the binary with the same credentials.

Links

• https://community.developer.atlassian.com/t/deprecation-of-download-attachments-apis/94448
• https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/confluence/changelog/ (CHANGE-2735)
• HTTP 401 on download_attachments_from_page() but not get_attachments_from_content() atlassian-api/atlassian-python-api#1601 (same symptom in the underlying library)