Accidentally changed the status of all existing workflows using simplified workflow.

Question

I have an interesting problem. A user with admin rights accidentally changed a couple of statuses for all projects using the simplified workflow to a custom status they created.

For example, every issue that was assigned the status of "Done", now has the status of "Win", across every active project (about 80 projects). Unfortunately, they don't recall what they did to get to that point and I can not figure out how to undo this. Note the issues are actually assigned the status, it's not just an additional status.

What's odd, is it only seemed to affect active projects. If i create a new project, it uses the correct, default statuses in the simplified workflow.

Alexander Stern _ Shern Consulting OÜ · Answer

This is one of those situations where the real difficulty comes after the change — figuring out exactly what was modified and how to safely roll it back.

Even though Jira records these events, isolating the workflow-related changes and understanding them clearly can still take time, especially when multiple items are affected.

In practice, having a more focused view of workflow changes makes it much easier to reconstruct what happened and avoid missing anything during recovery.

Kyle Hurson · Answer

I realize this thread is quite old but this exact scenario happened to me and I was able to find a solution.

When new workflows are set up, they use the default statuses: To Do, In Progress, and Done. By editing any of these statuses, you are involuntarily editing the default for all Company Managed project workflows.

The solution is:

* Navigate to Admin Settings > Issues > Statuses (in the left menu, under issue attributes)
* Find the new status you created
* Click on the hyperlinked "# associated workflows" and manually fix them* The list will most likely include inactive workflows as well so be mindful to ignore those and not waste time

* The most efficient way to update the workflows is to add the default status in again via + sign at the top (new editor) and move any applicable transitions to the replacement before deleting the status you accidentally implemented to all

There may very well be a less manual method to fixing this but it is a solution I have found that worked for me.

Juliane_O · Answer

Hi, although this is a bit old, this happened to me now too.

I had a newly created Workflow using the Sub-Task Issue Type. The Issue Type already existed in the project but there was no workflow for it. I even COPIED the workflow from another project. Not it changed Open to Backlog in the copy AND the original workflow. And in neither of it I can change it back because it says a status with the name open already exists.

Please help!