Atlassian Account not associating with existing user account on JIRA/Confluence Cloud

Summary

When a customer deletes an Atlassian Account on AID (id.atlassian.com), the account linked to it on a JIRA/Confluence Cloud instance will still exist, broken, when another Atlassian Account is created or has its email changed to match the account on JIRA/Confluence Cloud email, it does not update the Atlassian ID to match the new Atlassian Account, it keeps the old Atlassian ID, not associating it.

Steps to reproduce

1. Have an user created on an instance using emailA@test.com
2. Delete this Atlassian Account on email emailA@test.com
3. Change another Atlassian Account or create a new one with the emailA@test.com
4. Log in to the JIRA/Confluence Cloud instance with the emailA@test.com

Expected Behaviour

User has access to the instance as before.

Actual Result

Error thrown on the UI: "Your email address emailA@test.com doesn't have access to <instance>.atlassian.net"

Notes

The situation showed up a case where customers still impacted by the Atlassian Account migration, had two accounts created, email@olddomain.com (On BitBucket) and email@newdomain.com (On JIRA/Confluence) and they tried to unify them by removing the one with the new domain so they could change the email on the current user's Atlassian Account to use the new domain email.

Workaround

The JIRA/Confluence Cloud user account can be deleted and re-created using the same username in order to keep the historical data, use this create user page in order to be able to customise the username (by standard, the username will be automatically generated using the email's prefix. ie: charlie@domain.com, username: charlie).

• https://<instance>.atlassian.net/admin/users/add