Linking user accounts leave behind corrupted users

Making another report of this since this issue has been plaguing two of our tenants for over a month now and auth0 is yet to respond with ANYTHING. We’re using the management API user linking endpoint (/api/v2/users/{id}/identities) to link email connections to users with database connections. This used to work fine for months, but about a month ago we noticed that linking user accounts is leaving broken users behind that show up in the dashboard but can’t be deleted, “User Not Found” error.

The linking process is successful and the email connection shows up as a second identity of the user like it’s supposed to, but the linking process leaves a broken version of the user we just linked behind. This broken user shows up in the dashboard but can’t be opened, it also shows up in management api user search queries.

If I search for users via email.raw query with the /api/v2/users endpoint, I can find two users with the same email, one of them being the broken email connection user that we linked to the database connection user. If I look for the user with /api/v2/users/{id}, the user can not be found. Same thing if I try to delete this “ghost” user.

I don’t know if this is related to the indexing issues auth0 has been having lately, but this issue has been around for over a month now and is still on-going. I just tested this 15 minutes ago and linking users still leaves a broken user behind that is visible in the dashboard but can’t be opened and also can’t be deleted via the management api.

More reports about possibly the same issue, none of them have any solutions or even an acknowledgment from auth0 that it’s being looked into: Users appear in queries and dashboard after linking, but not when querying for a specific user. - Auth0 Community Phantom user blocks real user from signing in - Auth0 Community

If you are experiencing dashboard issues such as users list not refreshing, it may indicate that you are still on the old cluster.

One option is to migrate your tenant to the new cluster, however please note that metadata searches are restricted on the new cluster. This is outlined further in the following evaluation of the issue: Indexing delays on Search API for Free accounts • Auth0 Status Page

If you do not require metadata searches (either in the dashboard or via the Management API), or only require searching with the restricted set of attributes, please send an email to searchapi-issues@auth0.com with your tenant name and region, and a description of your issue to request being migrated to the new cluster.