Accidentally renamed global statuses duplicate names now blocking bulk rename across 189+ workflow

[Missy]

I'm a Jira Cloud admin (Standard plan) and I've gotten myself into a mess I can't resolve through the UI. I'm hoping someone here has dealt with something similar or knows a solution.

Late last night I was setting up a new project and accidentally renamed three global statuses instead of creating new ones. Because these were global statuses, the rename propagated instantly across hundreds of project workflows. The three affected statuses and their correct original names are:

"Raw Ideas" should be "Backlog" (currently 175 associated workflows)
"Approved/In Development" should be "In Progress" (currently 189 associated workflows)
"Under Internal Review" should be "Selected for Development" (currently 162 associated workflows)

Before I understood what had happened, I manually fixed 11 projects by removing the wrongly-named statuses and creating fresh ones with the correct names. This means "Backlog," "In Progress," and "Selected for Development" now exist as separate duplicate statuses. Jira won't let me rename the original statuses back to their correct names because those names are already taken by the duplicates.

Because these statuses are associated with a workflow, I can't delete them. I've seen the videos on how to make a copy of the workflow and delete the status, etc., but these statuses are associated with hundreds of workflows. What do I do?

[Fatma from VIP_LEAN Solutions · Accepted solution]

Hi @Missy ,
I would recommend you start by freezing any workflow changes until this is fixed. Then may be try to rename  the duplicates: Backlog - DUPLICATE DO NOT USE , In  Progress - DUPLICATE DO NOT USE etc.
Hoping after that you can use again the names for the original statuses. 

You can also open an Atlassian Support ticket to help with a backend-safe correction with a recovery path.

Good Luck 
Fatma

[Missy]

That worked! You are a life saver. Thank you so much.