Documentation

Login failures caused by corrupted user nodes in AEM as a Cloud Service

Last update: Wed Dec 24 2025 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Login failures can occur for a specific user in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a Cloud Service when their user node contains corrupted or incorrect data, such as an invalid email address. Removing the affected user node from the repository allows AEM to re-sync and recreate the user profile during the next login attempt, which resolves authentication issues.

To fix this, delete the problematic user node from the publish environment and verify successful login after re-sync.

Description description

Environment

  • Product: AEM as Cloud Service - Sites
  • Environment: Development Publisher
  • Constraints: Managed Services; issue observed only on the publish tier

Issue/Symptoms

  • Login attempts for one user fail while other internal users can log in successfully.
  • Error logs show messages such as Unable to authenticate … Login Failure: all modules ignored and Redirect target must not be empty or null.
  • The affected user’s node contains an email address with .invalid appended.

Resolution resolution

  1. In the Author environment, navigate to Tools > Deployment > Distribution > Publish/Preview.
  2. Open the Distribute tool and select the Delete action.
  3. In the Path Browser field, enter the exact path of the problematic user node (for example, /home/users/abc/xyzUser).
  4. Submit the request to delete the user node.
  5. Verify that the deletion is successful and confirm that the user can log in after their profile is re-synced.

Note: AEM as a Cloud Service doesn’t provide an out-of-the-box feature to search for specific user nodes on publishers. Manual navigation through likely paths in the Repository Browser is required. This issue affects only publisher instances, not author instances.

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