Unable to close an Issue. Jira Error = User 'unknown' does not exist.

[Matt Frost]

Given some recent turnover of staff we have some project bugs which were assigned and reported by users who are no longer with the business.

Remaining staff have seen these issues through to completion and now wish to close the issue within Jira. 

When trying to Close the issue the Assignee field now shows 'User'.

When trying to close the issue i get a red validation error which says:

User 'unknown' does not exist.

When trying to reassign and close the issue i receive a different error:

The 'unknown' accountId is an internal constant and should never be saved or externalised.

Both options prevent me from being able to close the work item within Jira. I'm wondering if anyone has experienced similar and how we want work through the issue so these work items can be closed please?

Thanks,

[Krister Broman [Advania]]

The users that was "turned over", how did you handle them in Jira?

Did you remove the users or inactivate them? If you removed them how did you go about doing that? 

This sounds as if you have done a delete of the users without first re-assigning all allocated items, maybe even by removing them through the database. Removing any users in Jira is risk prone, it is highly recommended to handle users that are no longer required by inactivating them instead of deleting them.

If you have deleted users in a bad way, then to fix it after requires a lot of work and requires much more than can be answered here. 

How many issues are you talking about that have this error? Do you have a backup and how many updates/new issues have been added since are some of the questions that you need to answer before a plan to resolve it can be formulated. 

I would also recommend to start discussions with an Atlassian partner before you try to resolve this by yourself.