Phantom user blocks real user from signing in

Help
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1

I have a user who can no longer sign in to out website. When I search for his email in Auth0 I see 2 users. When I click on one of them, I’m told that the user does not exist.

When the user tries to sign in he get this error:

error=access_denied&error_description=%7B%22statusCode%22%3A404%2C%22error%22%3A%22Not%20Found%22%2C%22message%22%3A%22The%20user%20does%20not%20exist.%22%2C%22errorCode%22%3A%22inexistent_user%22%7D

Decoded:

{
    "statusCode": 404,
    "error": "Not Found",
    "message": "The user does not exist.",
    "errorCode": "inexistent_user"
}

What should I do?

2

Based on the information you provided I would guess there’s a custom rule doing a user search operation (probably for account linking purposes) and that logic is obtaining two users for the email associated with the end-user having the problem. Given it detected two users it proceeds to try to link the accounts, but fails because the user identity in question no longer exists. The rule is likely also handling the failure in linking as complete failure in the login transaction which may or may not be what you intend.

If the above is correct the recommendation would be to disable the account linking rule or handling the actual failure in linking the account in a way that does not fail the underlying login transaction; the user would be able to complete authentication despite the error when trying to link an account based on the results coming from user search.

Have in mind that we are experiencing issues with user search functionality as noted in the status page so the best course of action for now could be disabling the rule.

3

There have been multiple report of this same issue for over a month now. The account linking functionality appears to be broken right now and leaves behind corrupted profiles that can not be deleted via the dashboard nor the management api. More details here: Users appear in queries and dashboard after linking, but not when querying for a specific user. - Auth0 Community

4

Thanks @jmangelo and @niklas.appelroth

This seems to be my issue exactly.

5

Thanks @jmangelo and @niklas.appelroth

This seems to be my issue exactly.