Disable flow auto off after 60 days with no runs

[Fredrik_Olofsso]

Hi

Is there a way to turn off or disable that Power Automate turns off flows that not has run for 60 days?

[Jcook · Accepted solution]

Hello @Fredrik_Olofsso 

This feature rolled out with a bug, the product group has been notified. Even button and scheduled flows through trigger annually, quarterly, are being disabled.

a fix should be rolled out hopefully soon

[Fredrik_Olofsso]

Thank you very much for a quick and good answer Jcook.

This was a button triggered flow. We will cross or fingers that a fix is coming son 😄 

[JoshPedersen]

Has this been fixed or still outstanding? I have some flows that could possibly have months between triggers and I cannot afford the time to keep checking up to make sure they are all still active!

[Jcook]

Hi @JoshPedersen 

This has not been fixed yet. In the meantime just watch out for the emails from Flow. You will receive a email 7 days before the Flow gets disabled.

[jonwaite]

I've gotten a number of these emails.  I manually turn the Flows back on.  Does this reset the 60 day period?

[Jcook]

Hi @jonwaite 

Yes from what I have seen this will reset it.

[teqs]

Any News on this? I got such a email today and I am pretty surprised by the mail. We have some flows for forms and such things, they are triggered when someone use it and it would be a problem when they got not triggered. Is there any option to shut this (in my opinion stupid default) "feature" off?

It make no sense for flows which are triggered by forms or other things which are e.g. used quarterly.

[MSTill]

I think the entire idea of turning off Flows after a certain period of inactivity is a major league annoying "bug". Obviously I am not the only one that thinks it's useful to automate rare events. I have approval workflows for controlled quality management documents and the revisions of these aren't evenly spread over time but come rather in clusters with long periods in between. Relying on the email notifications is also a hassle as I am constantly spammed with messages from Power Automate providing me with useless or even wrong Information. Frequently I receive messages that there has been an unusual number of failures in the past week, occasionally referencing flows that have not run for a month or even longer (says so in the run history).

[MSTill]

I have found a cool and simple solution:

How to automatically re-enable flow using Power Automate - MoreBeerMorePower (hatenablog.com)

Basically it is a flow triggered by the automatic email notification about the flow having been shut down. From the body of this email the flow and it's environment are extracted by a series of nested splits and then used as input for the "Turn on flow" function. However, there is a typo in the article.

It reads:

Finally, turn on the flow using Power Automate Management action. The action has two inputs, environment name and flow name, which can be obtained by split result string in previous Compose:

Environment

split(outputs('Compose_-_extract_url'),'/flows/')?[0]
Flow

split(outputs('Compose_-_extract_url'),'/flows/')?[0]

 The lower split for the Flow entry should be instead:

Flow

split(outputs('Compose_-_extract_url'),'/flows/')?[1]
Tried it out and worked like a charm... 

[relseh]

For the love of God fix this FFS Microsoft. This is pathetic that it hasn't been fixed in 3 months! Get off your collective lazy butts already! This isn't free Google crap, this is licensed software. You don't get to bungle an update and leave the resultant mess to your paid clients for extended periods of time without backlash. 3 months is long enough. Get it together, or stop pretending the product is ready for primetime.

[UdayAdhikari]

All, adding some information that was recently shared by Microsoft...

This is by design and not a bug; if flows have no activities (run, edit etc.) they are turned off after specific days. However, if the flow is running under paid Power Automate SKU (not acquired from O356 SKUs) license this does not apply, meaning the flow will stay active beyond 60 days.

I have few quarterly flows and running into the same dilemma. Hope this brings some clarity.

Part of the conversation with Product Team:

First -  we have noticed a lot of users try out flows, to never come back – these flows keep running in the background – providing zero customer value – while running meters on the Power Automate side of things.

Second – as we start getting closer to enforcing API limits, we want to ensure that users don’t have flows that are drawing down capacity without their knowledge. This can happen if you have frequently polling triggers – that don’t result in any action executions.

Third – a small percentage of our user base – sometimes ends up misconfiguring their triggers such that they never fire, and will never run an action.

Please click Accept as solution if my post helped you solve your issue. This will help others find it more readily. It also closes the item. If the content was useful in other ways, please consider giving it Thumbs Up.

Thanks

[UdayAdhikari]

And just found the link that covers what I explained above:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/limits-and-config#expiration-limits

[FlatOut]

Thank you for explaining.

This is a really stupid decision by Microsoft. So quarterly flows now can't work? They cannot be serious? Do Microsoft, never do anything quarterly...(joke)...?

So we are allowed to automate things, just not things that we don't do that often. The reason I wanted to automate these things, is because I do them infrequently and so it is a hassle as it's not fresh in my mind. 

I spent ages getting my Flows working and before they have even run for the first time, they are being disabled. 

[teqs]

---

@FlatOut wrote:

This is a really stupid decision by Microsoft. So quarterly flows now can't work? They cannot be serious? Do Microsoft, never do anything quarterly...(joke)...?

So we are allowed to automate things, just not things that we don't do that often. The reason I wanted to automate these things, is because I do them infrequently and so it is a hassle as it's not fresh in my mind. 

---

Exactly!

I can't believe some decisions, which are made for Power Automate (MS Flow). We are a small company and I think there are often flows, like forms for vacation requests, which sometimes are not used more than 60 days. I really can't believe this crappy decisions of MS.  There should be a simple option to "PREVENT a flow from auto disable". Just that simple.

[PLIVING]

With Covid, there are tons of exceptions this past year and some processes aren't getting done as often as before.  This really needs to be addressed.  I see the point about test flows and such wasting resources, but many of us have legitimate production flows that simply may not run very often.  One example is an alert for classroom checks that I created when equipment is not working.  We may go several months without an issue, so the workflow won't get triggered, but it will most certainly need to trigger when there is an issue.

[relseh]

Agreed wholeheartedy @PLIVING !

[jessdom3]

Microsoft needs to change this process ASAP.

We (like many others) have flows that only trigger during a specific time frame each year when customers are allowed to submit a particular form.  We have a flow that only triggers when someone submits an idea for approval, or submits a new event for the corporate calendar, and MONTHS can go by between submissions. We have flows tied to a Power App to enable mass updates to data used in the app that are only required when someone leaves the org and their records needs to be reassigned. All of these instances are sporadic, or have small time windows, but *I* do not have time as an admin to review umpteen emails about flows at risk of being disabled (or which HAVE been disabled) simply because they have legitimately been inactive for a time.

Additionally, re-enabling a flow that that Microsoft disabled due to inactivity DOES NOT WORK. The next time their system checks for inactive flows (as soon as a week later in my experience) it will be disabled again.

Microsoft needs to re-evaluate this process and at the very least give us the ability to indicate that the flow is still valid even though it hasn't been active. Send the emails about inactivity and let us check a box that says "I am not using this flow, disable it" or "This is still an active flow, keep it enabled". Even if I had to do that every 90 days it would be better than the flows we require to do business being disabled on us just because there's no need to trigger them at the moment.

[mlavender]

I received a notification today that one of our flows will be disabled because it hasn't triggered in the past 90 days. Why is Microsoft automatically disabling flows?  This doesn't make any sense.

[walkers]

Is there any ETA on a fix for this issue????