The day software development came to a standstill at a major European financial institution

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Atlassian products are frequently found at the heart of the financial systems that many governments and commercial enterprises depend upon. As a result, the consequences can be significant when something goes unexpectedly wrong with their Atlassian stack.

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Kristoffer Hansen is a seasoned software developer who has worked for some of Norway's most important financial institutions since 2019. Today, he works for a Norwegian government organization that enables seamless cash flow between 1,300 government entities. Together, those entities account for 2% of the Norwegian government's yearly expenditures. To deliver on this vital mission, the organization employs approximately 150 software developers, of which roughly 1/3 are external consultants.

The IT team within that organization depends on Jira, Jira Service Management, and Bitbucket. One morning in August 2024, Kristoffer came to the office at 8:30 in the morning and was met by the following message: 

The entity in question had hit the license ceiling for Bitbucket, Jira, and Jira Service Management. And the message created tremendous stress and anxiety among the 150-FTE-strong developer organization.

For regulatory and practical reasons, the government entity uses Atlassian Data Center hosting, and this morning, they experienced a situation caused by a licensing mechanism that many are unaware of. This organization assumed that when the number of Atlassian users in their instance hit the maximum level of their licensing tier, the only consequence would be the Atlassian administrator's inability to add more users.

In reality, all users were locked out of the Atlassian products on which they depended. For the developers involved, this meant they were suddenly unable to do their job. All software production stopped.

Luckily, the situation was resolved within roughly 30 minutes by having the Atlassian administrators execute a manual "emergency cleanup" of users.

Still, the harm was done. The developers' trust in their employer was diminished, and the manual emergency work created could have been easily avoided.

Any organization relying on Atlassian products can prevent this by configuring automatic, rule-based user cleanups that run regularly, typically weekly or bi-weekly.

In this particular organization, the problem arose from a regular influx of new JSM users from other related government entities. This steady stream of new users happens organically, and by definition, it consists of people who are not internal employees who are covered by structured onboarding and offboarding processes.

In high-turnover situations like this, it is imperative to set up regular user cleanup routines.

This is just one recent example I encountered. Collectively, my team and I have been exposed to dozens more.

How about you? Have you encountered similar situations? How was it overcome? What steps have you taken to prevent a reoccurrence?

I'd love to hear your story in the comments below. You can also reach me privately via a direct message on LinkedIn. 

[kc]

Curious if this will happen on the Cloud version?

[Simen Burhol_Kantega SSO_]

@Kelvin CHUA : For cloud annual subscription, you will experience reduced functionality in e.g. Confluence if you exceed your user-tier limit. 

So you either need to upgrade your user-tier limit or cleanup/deactivate users to retain full functionality. 

[Parsa Shiva]

Wow, it's eye-opening to see how something like this can disrupt an entire operation.
It's amazing to know there are solutions that can prevent such major setbacks!! 

[Dave Liao]

I've experienced this several times on Data Center instances. 🥲

• Confluence becomes read-only. 😬
• Jira does too - you can't create issues.

Definitely not a fun thing to experience. 🎃

Thankfully there's a license check in recent versions of the Atlassian Troubleshooting & Support add-on for Jira DC and Confluence DC. Just make sure you configure it to an appropriate threshold that you care about - say, if you're 10% to the user limit you're entitled to.

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

As I don't work frequently with the DC platform, this information is quite insightful, to say the least.

Regarding cloud and this comment @Simen Burhol_Kantega SSO_ :

For cloud annual subscription, you will experience reduced functionality in e.g. Confluence if you exceed your user-tier limit.

We're discussing IdP-synced sites, right? For local directories, I know you cannot invite new users to the site once you reach the cap. However, with IdP-synced directories, I've noticed that some customers manage to exceed the limit but I haven't been able to find clear information on what actually happens if you do exceed the tier.

[August Heltne - Kantega SSO]

@Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_

We're discussing IdP-synced sites, right?

Yes. I believe that you need to configure user provisioning with Atlassian Guard to exceed your user tier in Cloud.

However, with IdP-synced directories, I've noticed that some customers manage to exceed the limit but I haven't been able to find clear information on what actually happens if you do exceed the tier.

According to this page, Confluence will prevent you from editing the description of spaces and from creating personal spaces as long as you exceed your user tier. The page also contains a link to a bug report which contains steps describing how to exceed the license tier which can be useful to know for avoiding the problem.