'Detected ancestors table corruption' error in Confluence 6.5 or later
Platform notice: Server and Data Center only. This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Server and Data Center platforms.
Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.
*Except Fisheye and Crucible
Problem
Users report that they can no longer see pages that they would expect to be able to see, and the following appears in the atlassian-confluence.log:
Detected ancestors table corruption for pageId: 1234567.
Access to this page is blocked for all users as inherited permissions cannot be determined.
To resolve this, rebuild the ancestors table. See https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Rebuilding+the+Ancestor+TableCause
In Confluence, view page restrictions are inherited from the parent page. This behaviour relies on the ancestors table in the database. If Confluence detects that there are missing ancestor table entries for a page that a user is trying to access, it will block access to that page. This prevents people inadvertently viewing a page that should not be visible to them (because of the inherited view restrictions).
Resolution
To resolve this issue, you will need to Rebuild the Ancestor Table.