Issues with ci cd job to connect to registry

Authenticating towards registry stopped working.

Here is the output of the job. The same exact code (different tag ofc.) worked a couple of days ago.

Running with gitlab-runner 14.4.0-rc1 (bc99a056)
  on docker-auto-scale z3WU8uu-
Resolving secrets
00:00
Preparing the "docker+machine" executor
00:08
Using Docker executor with image gcr.io/go-containerregistry/crane:debug ...
Pulling docker image gcr.io/go-containerregistry/crane:debug ...
Using docker image sha256:16bc23c93214439858a172d8b4556d447c11b2cff86558c894a7ce1c7cee49a1 for gcr.io/go-containerregistry/crane:debug with digest gcr.io/go-containerregistry/crane@sha256:41857f2d0857a139d09ac7030d3511088e55d6e0c0ed7f2ae4469c5c22998677 ...
Preparing environment
00:01
Running on runner-z3wu8uu--project-25709757-concurrent-0 via runner-z3wu8uu--srm-1637155281-a0491525...
Getting source from Git repository
00:02
$ eval "$CI_PRE_CLONE_SCRIPT"
Fetching changes with git depth set to 50...
Initialized empty Git repository in /builds/<group>/<project>/.git/
Created fresh repository.
Checking out 0c5564ff as v0.8.19...
Skipping Git submodules setup
Executing "step_script" stage of the job script
00:01
Using docker image sha256:16bc23c93214439858a172d8b4556d447c11b2cff86558c894a7ce1c7cee49a1 for gcr.io/go-containerregistry/crane:debug with digest gcr.io/go-containerregistry/crane@sha256:41857f2d0857a139d09ac7030d3511088e55d6e0c0ed7f2ae4469c5c22998677 ...
$ crane auth login -u $CI_REGISTRY_USER -p $CI_REGISTRY_PASSWORD $CI_REGISTRY
2021/11/17 13:22:43 logged in via /root/.docker/config.json
$ crane cp $SOURCE $DESTINATION
2021/11/17 13:22:43 Copying from registry.gitlab.com/<group>/<project>:0c5564ff to registry.gitlab.com/<group>/<project>:v0.8.19
2021/11/17 13:22:43 No matching credentials were found for "registry.gitlab.com"
Error: fetching "registry.gitlab.com/<group>/<project>:0c5564ff": GET https://gitlab.com/jwt/auth?scope=repository%3A<group>%2F<project>%3Apull&service=container_registry: DENIED: access forbidden
Cleaning up project directory and file based variables
00:01
ERROR: Job failed: exit code 1

Self healed apparently. Guessing gitlab broke in silence.