How reCAPTCHA works in Atlassian Cloud including Jira, JSM, and Confluence
Platform Notice: Cloud - This article applies to Atlassian products on the cloud platform.
Summary
reCAPTCHA is a security feature used to distinguish human users and automated bots accessing a website or online service.
Sometimes, verifying reCAPTCHA fails with an error message like "We are having trouble verifying reCAPTCHA for this request. Please try again."
Resolve reCAPTCHA verification failures
If you see repeated reCAPTCHA errors similar to the above, we recommend you:
- Try a different browser
- Try incognito mode or private browsing
- Try a different device such as a separate computer
- If using a VPN, disable it
- Where available, use a different connection like mobile data or 5G instead of Wi-Fi
Examples of reCAPTCHA appearing in Atlassian products
reCAPTCHA verification is required in Atlassian products such as Jira and Confluence, after:
multiple failed login attempts
the system suspects suspicious activity
being invited to a site
During product authentication
Users may be prompted to complete reCAPTCHA verification on https://id.atlassian.com when logging in or during the user sign-up flow.
Users may successfully complete the verification checks but continue to see an error related to reCAPTCHA validation. This is often due to a secondary check that takes into account various elements such as browser data or network connection data.
Atlassian Admin Hub
Within https://admin.atlassian.com certain actions like user invites trigger a reCAPTCHA validation in the background. Users will not be prompted to complete a verification when inviting others, but in cases where reCAPTCHA validation returns a low score users will see the error: "Something went wrong."
Analyzing the network traffic will show the following error:
{
"key": "automationNotAllowed",
"context": {
"message": "Automation is not allowed."
}
}
Jira Service Management (JSM) customer portal
The JSM customer portal also utilizes reCAPTCHA to protect sites from spam or malicious issue creation. When users fail the verification process or have a low reCAPTCHA score on the backend validation, tickets cannot be submitted with the following error:"We couldn't verify that you're not a robot. Try sending the request again."
If issues continue to persist, Atlassian Support can assist. In some cases, reCAPTCHA can be disabled within the Admin Hub and the Jira Service Management customer portal.
This feature cannot be disabled for authentication and sign-ups via https://id.atlassian.com.
Related feature requests and bug reports
We have multiple feature requests and bugs identified to improve Captcha management :
- ID-8310 - Allow administrators to disable CAPTCHA for specific users
- ID-8114 - Unable to invite users through the Invite Users button
- ID-8331 - Allow Captcha to be enabled for logging in to Atlassian Cloud
- ID-8345 - reCAPTCHA V2 fallback if reCAPTCHA V3 give a false positive
- JSDCLOUD-8217 - Provide ability to turn on and off captcha in Customer Portal
- JSDCLOUD-11177 - Allow administrators to disable RECAPTCHA for specific customers
- JSDCLOUD-13152 - Captcha validation it's not working appropriately when raise request to a login free portal
We encourage you to upvote and add yourself as a watcher to the suggestion ticket, so you may be notified on any updates. For more details on how we address these, please refer to our implementation of new feature policy.