Impact of removing managed accounts (claimed via domain) on access to other Jira sites

Question

I have a question regarding Atlassian Guard and managed accounts.

Here is our current situation:

* We have verified our domain and enabled automatic account claiming.
* As a result, users with the same domain (including those using completely different Jira sites) have been added as managed accounts in our organization.
* Some of these users appear with the status "Not invited" in the user directory.

My question is:

If we remove these users from our organization (via the Administration → Users page),

Will this action affect their access to other Jira sites (outside of our organization)?

Additional clarification:

* These users may actively use Jira in other organizations/sites.
* We only want to remove them from our organization, not disrupt their existing usage elsewhere.

If anyone has experience with this scenario or can point to official documentation, I would really appreciate your help.

Thanks in advance!

Arkadiusz Wroblewski · Answer

@nagata shumpei

You’re spot on. Removing those users from your organization only cuts their ties to your specific sites and data. It doesn't impact their access to any other Jira instances or organizations where they might be using that same Atlassian account.

This works because Atlassian treats "access" and "identity" as two separate layers. When you remove someone from your organization, you're essentially just taking back their key to your front door; it doesn't stop them from using that same key for other buildings they already have permission to enter.

Even if these accounts were accidentally claimed by your domain, unclaiming them simply makes them "unmanaged" again. They keep their account and whatever external access they already had. The only thing you really want to avoid is deactivating the account. Deactivation is a global kill-switch that locks the account entirely, which would prevent them from getting into any Atlassian apps anywhere.

So, as long as you just remove them from your organization without hitting the deactivation button, their access to other sites will stay exactly as it is.

If you want, make small Test with 1 User.

nagata shumpei · Answer

Thanks for your clarification.

I’d like to confirm one more specific scenario to ensure I fully understand.

In our organization, we currently have around 100 managed accounts.
However, about 30 of these users were unintentionally added as managed accounts due to domain verification and automatic claiming. These users actually belong to other Jira sites (different organizations) and are not intended to be managed by us.

If we remove these users from our organization via the user management page ("Remove user"):

→ Will this have any impact on their access to other Jira sites or organizations where they are actively using Jira?

For context:
- These users are not invited to our site
- We only intend to remove them from our organization
- We want to make sure their existing access elsewhere remains unaffected

Could you please confirm this behavior?

Thanks again for your help.

Arkadiusz Wroblewski · Answer

@nagata shumpei

You're exactly right. Removing a user from your organization only cuts off their access to your specific sites. It won’t affect their ability to log into other Jira instances or organizations where that same Atlassian account is still active.

Basically, removing them from the org is local to your environment, while deactivating the managed account shuts it down everywhere.