https://community.cloudera.com/t5/Support-Questions/kafka-delete-doesnt-work/m-p/169641#M131947 <P>Although an old post, updating here for any future visitors: This issue occurs in most cases due to one or more of the brokers being unavailable, if not any of the above mentioned ones.</P><P>The controller node completes a topic deletion only after all the topic's partition replicas are removed from all the brokers. </P><P>So validate that brokers that are currently online by checking the following znode, since sometimes although the broker processes are in running status, they may not be actually part of the cluster because of various reasons such as memory contention and continuous GC cycles:</P><P>zk&gt; ls /brokers/ids</P> Tue, 25 Apr 2017 01:27:13 GMT rmaruthiyodan 2017-04-25T01:27:13Z