Delete deactivated users from Atlassian cloud.

Hello @r ghisa 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

When you permanently delete the Atlassian Cloud account for a user, everyplace that user account is referenced (page information, user selection fields, activity history, comments, etc.) will be changed to display "Former user". You will no longer have any record of where that user was used throughout your Jira and Confluence data.

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/what-happens-when-an-account-is-deactivated-vs-deleted/

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/delete-your-account-962956972.html

The user's name will also be purged from application System Audit Logs and from the Organization level audit logs in compliance with GDPR.

Welcome to the Atlassian Community @r ghisa 

Why delete inactive users?

The don't count toward your licenses.

The one major problem you will face if there are any filters the inactive users have under their names will be broken once you delete them from Jira. You could affect reports as well.

Try first to check if inactive users have any filters, dashboards, under their name assign them to an active user then delete them.

Best,

Fadoua

Thank you for all the answers, really appreciate it. But in my opinion, this is wrong wrong behavior in Atlassian. (large) companies end up with 100+K deactivated accounts over the years while their active population is only 20% of that number - this is a real example, not made up numbers.

@r ghisa I always remove access but don't delete. If you do, you'll need to know their user id to do any searches for old information tied to them. It also makes taking ownership of spaces, private filters etc. harder to do.

I'd suggest you export the users to get the name and ID before removing them altogether if you are forced to do this by a policy that wasn't fully thought out.

@Trudy P Claspill do you know if there is a difference if your organization has claimed the accounts and/or is using Guard?