Why does the SharePoint Shared With column show deleted users?

Hi @Ken Stewart , thank you for posting in the Q&A forum.

Please confirm: Which version of SharePoint are your using, SharePoint Online or SharePoint Server? Do you mean you want to remove the deleted users from people picker in your environment?

The users that are deleted from Microsoft 365 admin center/Active Directory but remain in SharePoint people picker are called Orphaned Users.

1. If you are using SharePoint Server, you can manually remove the orphaned users from content database referring to this article: Find and Delete Orphaned Users in SharePoint.
2. If you are using SharePoint Online, a deleted user is kept for 30 days before the user's data is permanently deleted.
   You can refer to this document for how to remove deleted users from SharePoint Online manually.

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Thanks, @Chelsea Wu . You've given me some useful leads, but I haven't been able to resolve this yet.

We use SharePoint Online. The users in question were removed using MS admin center much longer than 30 days ago, and they no longer appear under Deleted users. My understanding is that People Picker is available for SharePoint Server only. In any case, we're not trying to use that tool.

The document you referred me to for removing deleted users from SharePoint was useful in pointing me to People and Groups, where the deleted users still appeared. I deleted them there, but they still appeared on our other pages. I double-checked everything and ended up deleting all browser history, cache, etc. for all time, without effect.

They don't appear to be orphaned users at the levels I'm looking at. I use Manage Users and Advanced to look at shares (no existing links) and permissions for all users at the most granular level, but they don't appear there -- only in the Shared With column. Here are a couple of screen captures of the Shared With column (1st) and Permissions for the Business Development folder (2nd). Note the disparity, in particular, for deleted users Jay Sherman and Becky Casciato.

@Chelsea Wu , here's another example from our Executives folder where some deleted users appear in Shared With but not in Permissions, but other current users appear in Permissions but not in Shared With.

Is the mentioned issue still a known issue? With one of my customers, I'm facing exactly the same. There are no longer active users (deleted), but they are still visible in the column 'Shared with' in Sharepoint Online. So I'm curious if there is any update on this issue.