Announcing: Automatic permanent removal of soft-deleted users

Announced on	Rollout starts	Rollout ends
October 6, 2022	January 6, 2023	May 1, 2023

Starting January 6, 2023, Zendesk will begin automatically deleting soft-deleted users older than 30 days. This will save you a step and make it easier for you to perform deletions that are compliant with international legal regulations. This will apply both proactively and to previously soft-deleted users. 

This announcement answers the following questions:

• What's changing and why?
• How will this affect me?
• What do I need to do?

What's changing and why?

Currently, permanently deleting a user is a multi-step process, and when a customer deletes a user, Zendesk first soft deletes the user. This means the users are still in the Zendesk database and viewable on a limited basis only to Zendesk employees with certain database privileges. Then, in order for users to be permanently deleted from all instances in Zendesk, which is required for compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR, the customer must take additional action to individually permanently delete the soft-deleted users. More information on how to delete users can be found in the Deleting Users article.

Starting January 6, 2023, all soft-deleted users will automatically be permanently deleted for you. In addition, all soft-deleted users in a customer’s backlog who have yet to be permanently deleted will also be removed on this date. These actions will be captured in the Audit Log page in the Admin Center.

Currently, users are not recoverable from either soft or permanent deletion, which will remain the same going forward.

How will this affect me?

Starting January 6, 2023:

1. Soft-deleted users will automatically be permanently deleted 30 days later.
2. Any currently soft-deleted users (who have been soft-deleted for greater than 30 days) will be permanently deleted.

Customers may continue to manually permanently delete individual users from the Deleted Users page in the Admin Center before the 30 days.

Any closed tickets associated with the user will not be deleted but will display “permanently deleted user” in place of the name and email address.

Before: A soft-deleted user’s name and avatar are still presented in the UI.

After: A permanently deleted user’s name and avatar have been removed completely.

What do I need to do?

No action is required. As of January 6, 2023, all soft-deleted users going forward will automatically be permanently deleted 30 days later, and all existing soft-deleted users will also be removed. If you would like your soft-deleted users deleted sooner than January 6, 2023, please reach out to customer support.

As always, we’re here if you have questions or need support. Here’s how to contact us.