# Intermittent user search failures, January 2026

| **Severity** | P1       |
| ------------ | -------- |
| **Duration** | 13 days  |
| **Impact**   | 39 users |

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## What happened

A platform issue caused user search requests to fail intermittently. Where a Capable feature needed to look a person up, by name in an approval or a mention, that lookup sometimes returned nothing.

The symptom was intermittent rather than total, which is why it took time to characterise: the same search would succeed on a second attempt.

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## How you would have known

* Searching for a person returning no results when you know the account exists
* An approver or reviewer not appearing in a picker
* The same search succeeding when retried

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## Customer data

ℹ️

No data was lost. The failures were in reading user directory data, not in anything stored by our apps.

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## Resolution

Retrying the search usually succeeded. The underlying platform issue was resolved by Atlassian.

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## Related

[Intermittent content search failures, January 2026Another incident report.](https://help.gocapable.com/trust/intermittent-content-search-failures-january-2026.html)

[Forge invocation outage, January 2026Another incident report.](https://help.gocapable.com/trust/forge-invocation-outage-january-2026.html)

[Service incidentsEvery report.](https://help.gocapable.com/trust/service-incidents.html)

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_Written up, kept, and linked from the docs._