Locked Out of Bitbucket Cloud Workspace with No Admins and No Portal Access

[Tim Penner]

Hello Atlassian Community,

We’re in a situation where our Bitbucket Cloud workspace has no remaining administrators in the group because our previous admins have left the company, and nobody else was granted admin rights. Because no one is an admin, we cannot access workspace settings or open a support request through the usual portal (which requires admin privileges).

We’ve recovered the original admin’s email account and attempted to reset their password, but we’re still blocked by a 2FA challenge. Two-step verification had been disabled on that account, yet Atlassian continues to require a code we don’t have.

Question:
What is the recommended way to regain or reset administrator access in this scenario? Are there alternative escalation paths or contact methods to reach Atlassian Support when you completely lack portal access and are stuck on an unresolved 2FA requirement? Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

[Ben]

Hi @Tim Penner 

If all workspace admins have left the company, there was no offboarding procedure that replaced them with a current employee, and the reporter who raised the ticket is not an admin. This makes it not possible to verify that the person requesting the changes is a valid authority against the account, and we are not able to action administrative operations due to our security policies, which protect user data. Atlassian does not typically involve itself in ownership disputes in this manner. We would advise the reporter to gain access to an admin email inbox, and reset the Bitbucket password to grant the necessary access.

In future - to prevent issues, we would recommend ensuring a current employee has admin access prior to removing all workspace admins from the workspace.

With regard to the 2FA restriction - it takes 24 hours to receive a reset email for that users account. Were you able to login and gain access?

Cheers!

- Ben (Bitbucket Cloud Support)

[Brad_Lichty]

@Ben can you talk to the org admin? 

[Tim Penner]

We have reset the email of the Admin, but BitBucket is still asking us to confirm the 6-digit MFA code, despite MFA being disabled. We have even contacted this person directly and their MFA is disabled from this account, so he is unable to provide one. 

[Ben]

Hi @Tim Penner @Brad_Lichty 

As you've been able to gain access to the email inbox of the admin - I've raised a support ticket on your behalf. On that support ticket - I'll need you to share the ticket with the admin in question, and respond from that admin email address providing consent to modify the admin group membership.

Please check your email inbox for further correspondence, as it would not be appropriate to discuss this further on a public forum due to potentially sensitive data.

Cheers!

- Ben (Bitbucket Cloud Support)