Gaps in Jira Service Management issue keys on Cloud (missing issue numbers)

[Pablo Gómez Justicia]

Hi everyone,

in one of our Jira Service Management Cloud projects we’ve noticed that some issue keys appear to be missing from the sequence.

For example, we can see issues like ABC-3295 and ABC-3299, but there is no trace in the UI, notifications or filters of the intermediate keys (e.g. ABC-3296, ABC-3297, ABC-3298). There are no obvious gaps around those numbers, just this specific block.

We understand that Jira uses an internal per‑project counter and that issue keys are not reused, but we’d like to confirm the following specifically for JSM Cloud:

1. In what situations can an issue number be “consumed” or reserved by the system, but the corresponding issue never actually be created/visible to users?
   (e.g. failed validations, failed post‑functions, timeouts, imports, automation or integration errors, etc.)

2. Are such gaps in the issue key sequence considered expected behaviour in Jira/JSM Cloud?

3. Is there any official Atlassian documentation or knowledge base article that explicitly explains or acknowledges this behaviour (gaps / non‑reused issue keys / internal project counter) that we can share with our end‑users?

We’d appreciate any official references or explanations from Atlassian or from others who have had the same experience on Jira Service Management Cloud.

Thanks!

[Christopher Yen]

Hi @Pablo Gómez Justicia 

My first thought would be deleted issues like David covered, Could there be the issues were moved to another project and took the new key of that project leaving the previous issue # as a gap?

I'm sure it's also possible some kind of error on issues that failed to fully create could have reserved a key in the process without creating an issue though like in all the examples you mentioned in #1. I do see a suggestion for this to be fixed that is still unresolved which is the closest resource to an official documentation that confirms the behavior that I can find

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-77334

[David Freitez]

Hi @Pablo Gómez Justicia ,

Thank you for your question, please note that Jira does not skip issue keys, so the answer to where they are should be found in the following questions:

• Are you using issue security in that project?
  • Do you have permissions for all the levels in that project?
• Did you try searching for the issue keys?
• Are you using any kind of mail handling?
• Did you have a look at the log files?
  • Check if the issue was deleted, please refer to this raised request for the feature that explains where the it is located:  Provide an Audit Log for Deleted Issues in JIRA (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-59371)

Hopefully this helps you answer your inquiry, if so, please vote for it as the answer to your question.

Kind regards,
David

[Pablo Gómez Justicia]

Sorry, but that explanation doesn’t hold in our case.

I’m an administrator of both the instance and the project. There are no issue security levels configured in the project. When trying to access any of the “missing” issues, Jira simply shows:
“You don't have permission to view it, or it doesn't exist.”

We’ve checked the audit logs and we can clearly see other issues that were deleted in this project (and we were correctly notified about those). However, these missing issue keys do not appear in the logs at all.

No one has ever reported or claimed the existence of those missing issues either.

So, based on all the evidence, everything points to Jira skipping issue keys. It may be an edge case or some kind of sporadic internal error, but it does happen.

Not common, not documented… but real. Jira being Jira