Lost access to my Confluence Cloud site – now shows “401 Unauthorized” and missing from my Atlassian

Question

Hi everyone,

I used to have a Confluence Cloud site under my Atlassian account, which I used heavily for software architecture documentation. Recently, I noticed that Confluence no longer appears in my Atlassian apps list — only Jira does.

When I try to access a Confluence URL I had shared earlier this year (something like https://<my-site>.atlassian.net/wiki/ref), I get a “401 – Unauthorized” error.

When I tried to raise a support ticket, I got this message instead:

“Cloud site expired due to inactivity or payment issues. If you need to update payment details you can do so online at my.atlassian.com…”

This was a Free plan site, not a paid one, so I’m unsure why it expired or how to reactivate it.

Can someone from Atlassian or the community please confirm:

* Whether I can restore my expired Confluence Free site, and

* How to do so (since I don’t see a Reactivate option under my.atlassian.com)?

I just want to recover access to my old pages — even a read-only export would be fine.

Thanks in advance for any guidance!

Vishalakshi Narayana Swamy · Answer

Hi @Onyekachi Anushiem

Welcome to Atlassian community!

From the problem summary, I understand that your confluence instance is now deactivated.

Upon checking further, I see that your confluence instance is now deactivated and its been past 180 days already.

As per our data retention document: https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/data-storage-faq-873871367.html we only retain data for 60 days post deactivation and unfortunately it is not possible to recover the instance now.

Hope this helps!

Best Regards,

Vishalakshi Narayanaswamy

Barbara Szczesniak · Answer

@Onyekachi Anushiem See the responses in the similar recent question: https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-questions/Confluence-Content-Missing-After-Inactivity-Warning-Free-Site/qaq-p/3084570

Jehan Bhathena · Answer

Hi @Onyekachi Anushiem

I've tagged the Atlassian team in this thread, in the meantime, try to look for any of the mails from Atlassian that sends an inactivity period warning, it may have a subject like "Jump back in to Confluence to keep your subscription".

Atlassian deactivates any un-used sites after a certain period of inactivity.