User Self-Deletion

ZITADEL lets a user delete their own account. This is useful if you are building a "Delete my account" feature into your application, or if you need to comply with data deletion requests (e.g. GDPR right to erasure).

Delete the currently authenticated user

Use the Delete User endpoint from the User v2 API. The state of the user will be changed to deleted, the user will not be able to log in anymore, and endpoints requesting this user will return a "User not found" error.

curl --request DELETE \
  --url ${CUSTOM_DOMAIN}/v2/users/{user_id} \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer {token}'

Replace {user_id} with the ID of the user to delete and {token} with a valid access token.

Deleting via the ZITADEL Console

ZITADEL's own Console UI (under $CUSTOM_DOMAIN/ui/console/users/me) also offers a Delete Account button on the user's own profile page. It calls the same User v2 DeleteUser endpoint described above, so it enforces the same user.self.delete permission requirement.

What happens after deletion

• The user's state is set to deleted.
• All of the user's sessions and authentication tokens are invalidated.
• Subsequent requests referencing the user return a "User not found" error.
• The user can no longer authenticate against ZITADEL.

Building a "Delete my account" flow

When integrating this into your own application:

1. Require the user to be freshly authenticated (e.g. re-prompt for login or a second factor) before showing the delete option, since the action is irreversible.
2. Ask for explicit confirmation before calling the API.
3. Call the Delete User endpoint using the user's own access token, scoped to their own user_id.
4. After a successful response, clear any local session state and log the user out of your application.

If you need to retain a record of deletion requests for compliance purposes (e.g. GDPR/CCPA), log the request in your own application before calling the API. ZITADEL admins can still audit the deletion afterward via the Event API.