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Locked out of Bitbucket account due to institutional SSO + email alias conflict

Fred Angelo Batan Garcia
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December 23, 2025

I’m running into an account access issue with Bitbucket that seems to involve institutional SSO and email aliases.

I originally created my Bitbucket account using an email address of the form:

> alias@university.edu

This address is an email alias that forwards to my actual university account:

>username@university.edu

Until recently, this worked normally with standard email/password login.

Now, when I try to reset the password for alias@university.edu, Bitbucket flags it as an institutional account and forces login via university SSO. When I go through SSO, Bitbucket automatically logs me into a different account associated with username@university.edu (apparently auto-provisioned by the university). That SSO-managed account does not have access to the repositories tied to the original alias@university.edu account.

As a result:

  • I cannot log in directly to the original account

  • Password reset is blocked by mandatory SSO

  • SSO always redirects me to a separate account with no repo access

This effectively locks me out of the account that owns or has access to my repositories.

Has anyone dealt with this before?

  • Is there a way to recover or merge the original account?

  • Can Bitbucket support re-associate the repositories with the SSO-managed account?

  • Or is creating a new account and having access re-granted the only viable fix?

Any insight would be appreciated.

1 answer

1 vote
Ben
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
December 28, 2025

Hi Fred!

Welcome to the Bitbucket Cloud community :) 

For accounts that are managed by an organisation (in this case, the university) - only authorised organisational admins from the university are able to make changes to accounts such as yours.

If you're not able to get in touch with the university and ask them to remove your account's relationship with the university - unfortunately, you will need to create a new account and ask the workspace amdin to grant access to this new account.

Cheers!

- Ben (Bitbucket Cloud Support)

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