Automation "rule actor doesn't have permission" on Sept 12th 13:30 Central

[Rosa M Fossi]

Was there an issue / outage this past Friday Sept 12th?  I can't seem to find one in Statuspage, but all of the sudden, around 13:30 CDT, I received over 20 'Automation Rule XYZ failed' email notices. All of the automation logs had the same "The rule actor doesn't have permission to view the event that triggered this rule"

The actor for those automations hasn't changed; it's the system "Automation for Jira" user which has full Admin permissions to the project. 

I've been monitoring, and things seem to be working as expected since then, but I would like to know if this is a known issue when reporting back to leadership on why we have scattered work items that didn't get transitioned, custom fields added, labels removed, commented on, etc. as expected around that time.  

Example:
 

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Rosa M Fossi 

Which trigger is your rule using?  If your rule is using the Work Item Created trigger, one possible cause is...

There are known racetrack timing problems with that trigger where occasionally the rule can start before all the data is available; the work item may even be in an unstable state with no type available.  The resulting symptoms are unexpected rule behavior and weird rule errors, including permissions problems.  Atlassian knows about this problem, is working on architectural changes to address it, and has no announced timeframe for doing so (as of July 2025).

With the addition of the new feature to add conditions to rule triggers, these symptoms can worsen as the errors happen before the rule starts running and these new conditions do not show what is actually wrong in the audit log.

A mitigation for this problem is:

• Immediately after the Work Item Created trigger, add the Re-fetch Work Item Data action.  This will slow the rule slightly, reloading the data before the steps proceed.
• Do not use the conditions in the trigger feature yet.  Instead, use individual conditions after the above re-fetch action.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Rosa M Fossi 

There is no incident noted for that data in the Atlassian Status page for Jira.

https://jira-software.status.atlassian.com/