Bulk delete work items in Jira
Platform Notice: Cloud Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the cloud platform.
Summary
Learn the available options to bulk delete work items in Jira Cloud.
Work item deletions are irreversible
Once deleted, the work items are permanently deleted and can't be recovered by Atlassian support. It is recommended to have a backup before bulk deleting work items. See Export data from Jira Cloud.
Solution
Use the Jira user interface
This bulk operation allows you to delete up to 1000 issues at a time.
Search the work items to delete.
Select ••• > Bulk change all work items.
Tick the box to select all work items to delete. Click Next.
Select Delete work items. Click Next.
Choose if you'd like to receive an email update for this update. Click Next.
Review your bulk operation, and select Confirm.
Delete work items using REST API
You can build a script that will run the REST API that is mentioned on the Developer API page to delete multiple work items all at once. Here is an example of a curl request using the delete API endpoint.
curl --request DELETE \
--url 'https://your-domain.atlassian.net/rest/api/3/issue/{issueIdOrKey}' \
--user 'email@example.com:<api_token>'Third-party app
The third-party app Mass Delete for Jira allows bulk deletion of work items without a limit of items per deletion.
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