Why can't I login to Confluence on my iPhone unless I use a private Safari tab?

[Robert Leach]

I have a confluence account associated with my Princeton email.  (I also have an account associated with my personal gmail address.)  I think this was the first time I ever tried to login on my iPhone. I'd gotten an email (to my PU email) saying a user edited one of my confluence pages and I wanted to take a quick look.

Tapping the link in the email, I got a message saying that my personal email didn't have access, so I tapped the "Log in to another account" button.  I entered my PU email and tapped the "continue" button.  It immediately advanced to an error about another PU email account (that I manage - not the PU email address I'd entered) not having access.

I don't understand why atlassian is referencing this other email address for which I've never created an Atlassian account.  I was never prompted to enter the password I have for atlassian for that PU email and I was not redirected to the ISO login.  And there seems no way to tell it, "hey, the email you're complaining about is not the one I entered!".  I even tried clearing cookies/caches, etc, and it still gives me the same error.

The only way I was able to login was to create a private tab.  Then, when I enter my PU email, it immediately goes to the ISO login without complaining about that other PU account I manage.

I don't want to have to use a private tab, because then I have to login every time.  What is the problem?

[Christos Markoulatos]

Hi @Robert Leach 

This is a browser issue, This usually happens because Safari caches your Atlassian login cookies and tries to reuse an old session tied to a different account (Safari on iOS aggressively caches cookies and login sessions). Private tabs work because they start fresh with no cookies, so the correct SSO flow kicks in. To fix it, clear only Atlassian cookies in Settings → Safari → Advanced → Website Data (search for atlassian.com and delete), then log out at https://id.atlassian.com/logout and sign in again with your Princeton email. Alternatively, use the Confluence mobile app, which handles multiple accounts better than Safari.

Hope this helps!

[Robert Leach]

You know, that's not it.  As I mentioned, I cleared the cookies & cache for atlassian and I was still getting the login error mentioning that unrelated PU email address.

I figured it out though.  Upon closer inspection, the error I was getting was coming from the SSO stuff.  The URL of the error page was a microsoftonline address. You're right though that it had to do with cookies/caches, because once I deleted the website data associated with microsoftonline, microsoftazuread-sso, and static.microsoft, it worked.

[Christos Markoulatos]

nice!