What could cause a single label to disappear?

[Melissa Mattee Murphy]

I noticed that a label that we use in our project fairly frequently has completely disappeared over the last two weeks. It is not selectable from the drop down when you start typing in the "labels" field, and there are no tickets that currently exist with the label. It's almost like it never existed.

BUT! We can look into past tickets that we know had the label, and in the history, we can verify the date that label was added. However, there's no update that the label was removed, even though that label is no longer on the ticket.

We've looked through our logs, and there were no bulk changes made, and no changes have really ever been made to labels in our Jira instance, beyond various projects creating new ones here and there. 

What could cause this? We did recently convert Epics to Features, but there was nothing touched with Labels, and so far, this is the only label that has gone missing. 

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Melissa Mattee Murphy 

Welcome.

Labels can only disappear from the system when  no issue is using that particular label anymore.

As you mention, you are sure nothing has changed, raise an issue with Atlassian Support.

They are able to check the backend of your instance and see all related logging.

[Melissa Mattee Murphy]

So if, say, there were an instance where all of the tickets that were tagged with that label became unlabled at the same time, would the label disappear? Or would it simply be able to be deleted? 

[Marc - Devoteam]

HI @Melissa Mattee Murphy 

Labels can' be deleted.

Labels disappear/delete themselves if not used on any issue in the instance.

So a bulk change had to be made or a move where the label didn't inherit itself on the move.

[Matt Doar _Adaptavist_]

The label isn't a huge long one is it? There is a limit

If you export one of those issues as XML you should be able to see whether the label is still there but not being shown for some reason

In a test Jira instance try adding the same label to a new issue and see if it is shown and persists

[Melissa Mattee Murphy]

Will try this, thank you! And no, it's very simple. Will explore the test instance further.