User still visible in dashboard user list but doesn't exist

We have a user still visible in our dashboard list after removal. When clicking the user, we get a “User Not Found” 404. Understood it may take several hours for this to be reflected in the indexes, but this user was removed 3 days ago.

History: this user was first created after successfully authenticating through instagram, then removed through our system using the Auth0 management API.

In testing account linkage we are experiencing problems since we can’t link this instagram Id to another account.

You mention that you’re unable to link that Instagram account to another account, but the identifier you provided already appears listed as a linked identity for an existing account, more specifically, it’s listed as an identity for a Twitter based account where the user has a name of (J… H…).

Besides the issue of the user still being listed as a main user in the list, can you confirm if there any other problems associated with trying to login through Instagram with that user? Also, if this happened as part of testing you could consider unlinking the identity from the Twitter user mentioned before and then link it again (this would get more useful information about the possible root cause, although, I’m not sure of the exact consequences).

In addition, can you please share more information on the exact steps and API calls that were performed and led to this issue with the user being listed, but not really existing anymore as a standalone user.

I have this same issue. There are users that I’ve made and deleted a few of the users are duplicates. They are visible in the dashboard, but they don’t exist.

I have this same issue. There are users that I’ve made and deleted a few of the users are duplicates. They are visible in the dashboard, but they don’t exist.

@admin17 you should raise this as a new question and ideally include the exact steps (specific API calls, etc) required to reproduce the issue you observed. I was never able to reproduce the issue so tracing the root cause is much more complex, if you can reproduce this situation or a similar one consistently and you describe the steps that would greatly help.

I’ve reproduced this issue multiple times but I don’t exactly know how it happened, so I cannot really explain.
Ideally I would just like to get these ghost accounts off of my dashboard.

Thanks for your replies. It was definitely linkage related. We were (but only after a while) able to get rid of the ghost account by doing the following.

  • unlinking the instagram|xxxxxx social ID from account B (even though initial linkage didn’t work)
  • then removing ghost account A completely using the API. Can’t remember if this gave us a 404 or not
  • subsequently removing user B completely

We were able to verify that account A and B, both with some reference to instagram|xxxxxx had disappeared in the dashboard and were then able to create a new account C using instagram|xxxxxx and did the process over a few times successfully.

So somehow it worked (not clear whether auth0 dashboard uses the same management API endpoints?) For linked accounts it makes a lot of sense to have some logic in your system to reconcile auth0 representation vs internal users, if any.

I’ve reproduced this issue multiple times but I don’t exactly know how it happened, so I cannot really explain.
Ideally I would just like to get these ghost accounts off of my dashboard.

I don’t think your solution will work for me, as I am not using any social login whatsoever.
I am really out of options and I have no idea how to remove the ghost users, and the fact that there is no way to create a support ticket is just frustrating.