Find removed user's issues

[Asier Vadillo]

Hi everyone,

We have removed a user from Jira, and we want to find all the issues assigned to the user.

The problem is that if you remove or disable a user, it will not appear in the dropdowns making imposible to search for the issues with a filter that was not already done.

If anyone has any help with the issue will appreciate the help!

[Ali Umut Terzi]

Hi @Asier Vadillo ! 👋

That’s a great question — this happens often when users are removed or disabled in Jira Cloud.
They no longer appear in dropdowns, but their issues still exist in the database linked by their accountId.

You can still find all of them by running a JQL like this 👇

assignee = 557058:8b0e4b5f-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

(Replace with the actual accountId — you can get it from any of their old issues via the browser’s Inspect tool.)

If you don’t have the accountId, try (Be carefull for typos):

assignee was "xxxxxx"

or

text ~ "xxxxxx"

Both can help surface issues where the user was once assigned.

I’ve used this method several times when cleaning up deactivated accounts — it works perfectly.

Hope this helps! 🙂

[Fazila Ashraf]

Hi @Asier Vadillo 

I am not sure about your access level. But you can reach out to your org admin to know the user id of the disabled user and use it in the JQL like => assignee = "62a08d89954f50006fcc3b99"

More details in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-73218

[Asier Vadillo]

Hi @Fazila Ashraf , only org admins can get the user id?