Deletion (and deactivation) seems to rely on the user credentials on the authoring instance and the public instance(s) to be the same. If authentication on the public instance(s) fails, then deletion will fail with an HTTP 401. The editor is shown an error message.

However: even when deletion has actually failed, the content is still deleted from the authoring instance. One needs to log in to each public instance to fix this.

Example error message (same message for normal deactivation, and for deactivation triggered by deletion):

Can't deactivate: : 2 errors detected:
Not able to send the deactivation request http://<primary-server>:8080/.magnolia/activation: Server returned HTTP response code: 401 for URL: http://<primary-server>:8080/.magnolia/activation on <primary node name>
Not able to send the deactivation request http://<secondary-server>:8080/.magnolia/activation: Server returned HTTP response code: 401 for URL: http://<secondary-server>:8080/.magnolia/activation on <secondary node name>