Certain users unable to search for groups in Secure macro

Summary

Certain users unable to search for groups in secure macro

when typing out the group name, the search keeps on loading infinitely

Diagnostics Steps

try to identify the differences between the user account that has the issue vs the ones that do not have the issue
verify if the affected user is using the correct Confluence Base URL

The Base URL must match the one configured in General Configuration page

get the affected user
- to try and replicate the problem on the machine where the users are not affected by the problem to isolate if it's machine related or specific problem
- to check if the same issue can be replicated on a different browser to isolate if it's related or specific to certain browser type/version
check Developer Tools (F12) for any errors in both Console and Network tabs while reproducing the issue. See Generating HAR files and analyzing web requests

If you see 401 Unauthorised error on a GET request in the Console, this indicates a permission issue and could happen when user access Confluence with a different Base URL than what has been configured.

From atlassian-confluence.log, you could compare and see the difference of the Base URL accessed by affected user vs non-affected user e.g. (notice that affected user has port 8443 appended in the Base URL)

Affected user

referer: https://confluence.domain.com:8443/pages/editpage.action?pageId=5407258 | url: /rest/api/content/5407258 | traceId: bad324e253b09147 | userName: john

Non affected user

referer: https://confluence.domain.com/pages/editpage.action?pageId=5407258 | url: /rest/api/content/5407258 | traceId: 324e253b87645 | userName: mike

Cause

This problem has occurred when a user was accessing Confluence with port 8443

for example https://confluence.domain.com:8443 but the Base URL was set to https://confluence.domain.com

The GET API request is detecting an unauthorised access and did not return the group being searched.

Resolution

Re-access Confluence using the correct Base URL and issue is resolved.