Flow is starting multiple times?

[leemex]

I have a flow which is supposed to start whenever there is a new or modified item in a list. For some reason, the flow sometimes runs two, three or even four times. The flow is creating new users in our O365 tenant. Whenever a user already exists, the flow should only update and not create the user (e.g. location of the user has changed). When flows are starting multiple times the condition whether its a new or existing user can't be triggered as they're running simultaneously, causing multiple account creation.

You can see there is nothing special about when the flow is supposed to start.

but a lot of instances:

Anyone experienced this issue before?

[v-yamao-msft]

Hi @leemex,

Have you checked the run details of runs that are running simultaneously?

Are they triggered by the same item?

About the Condition, when the Status is equal to Teilnehmer, what are the next actions have you configured?

When using the trigger “When an item is created or modified” in a simple flow, I don’t get the issue you mentioned.

Please show me more details to help reproduce this issue on my side.

Best regards,

Mabel Mao

[GabrielStJohn]

Hello, @leemex!

Have you had an opportunity to apply @v-yamao-msft‘s recommendation to adapt your Flow? If yes, and you find that solution to be satisfactory, please go ahead and click “Accept as Solution” so that this thread will be marked for other users to easily identify!

Thank you for being an active member of the Flow Community!

-Gabriel
Flow Community Manager

[leemex]

Hi @v-yamao-msft

Thanks for your answer.

Sorry for the late reply, I was on vacation 

It's quite random I figured - sometimes it does trigger 2 times, sometimes not and I simply can't find out why. The actions after the first conditions are more conditions 

[Anonymous]

Hi @leemex,

We are experiencing the same problem. Have you found a solution?

[leemex]

hey there

Really? I reported this problem to Microsoft and they reported (after a couple of weeks) that they have fixed the issue and it's already rolled out worldwide. 

After that confirmation, I tested it again and it didn't seem to appear anymore. 

[dhomburg]

Still happening here too. Getting frustrated with the number of hours wasted trying to find a solution while wading through massive amounts of misinformation. Had a process running absolutely perfectly on Zapier, then the Dynamics 365 v9 update broke it. Had to drop back to Flow. Added checks to see if the target values have been changed before allowing the duplicate Flow triggers. However the Flow instances happen so quickly that there is a race condition and even the checks on the target data don't work. This is just straight up broken tech. No excuse for it to have gone on this long. Stupid. 

[leemex]

I agree.
What you could try though is to force run only 1 instance at a time. You can do that by going to your flow settings and set something like "max simultaneous runs" or something like that. I don't have the exact wording at hand, currently, but you'll figure it out 🙂

[Tom_Slosse]

Hey

If you use the trigger created or modified, it can happen that the Flow runs multiple times.

So you create an item, the flow starts, in the meantime a colleague changes that exact same item, the flow runs a second time without you knowing. It will always run if the item has been modified.

This can only be the explenation of this behaviour.

Kind regards

Tom

[Anonymous]

Hi Tom,

Yes, this seems to have been the problem. A part of the flow actually triggered that items be modified, which seems to have started the flow all over again. Weird though that for 2 months the flow worked fine, and now it suddenly didn't. We solved our problem by using the trigger "When an item is created" instead.

Thanks everyone for the quick responses!

[dhomburg]

Hi Tom,

I set up a simple flow to test this. I have a new, unshared, Excel Online file to which another process appends a row. I ran the appending process only one time, ever.

I have a flow that checks for the Excel Online file to be modified and then sends an email with the last modified time of the Excel Online file.

I triggered the flow process at 9:52 am with the following results from flow:

1. At 9:53 am I got the first email from flow with a change date on the Excel Online file of "2018-10-26T14:52:23Z"
2. At 9:58 am I got a second email from flow with a change date on the Excel Online file of "2018-10-26T14:52:23Z"
3. At 10:02 am I got a third email from flow with a change date on the Excel Online file of "2018-10-26T14:52:23Z"

As you can see the change dates are identical. If the pattern I have seen over the last few months holds, I will randomly get about 8-20 more emails from the process over the next 24 hours. 

Zero other users have access to the Excel file, and the single row within it has not changed since it was appended.

The "OneDrive for Business - When a File is Modified (Properties Only)" connector itself seems to be broken. It's odd that some people seem to see this behavior and others don't.

Dale

[GeorgePB]

I have the same issue with the "When an existing item is modified" and the "When an item is created or modified" triggers, they get triggered by the same event multiple times.

Really annoying, almost all of my flows are based on those triggers and now i had to turn them off because i ended up spamming everyone.

Does anyone have any insight into this issue?

[Tom_Slosse]

Hey all

I've experienced, even in the early days when created and modified trigger came out, that this appears broken.

Since those issues I've never used this trigger, so if I can give you any advice I would always use when created trigger

Kind regards

Tom

[Anonymous]

I have the same problem with Dynamics 356: When a record is updated trigger. It triggers randomly 1 or 2 or sometimes even 3 times when closing an opportunity in CRM. Cant see why you would not fix this since a lot of people seems to be struggeling with it!! Any ideas?

[TrendyFlow]

Hi All,

I am facing issue with MS Flow running multiple times, we are sending notifications on status field and it sends notifications 3-4 times, that is not good for production site.

Any body found the solution for the same?

Thanks!

[ggalindo]

having the same problem

[chiranthaw]

having the same issue 😞

[365-Assist]

Also having this problem

[Jorge]

Having same issue when updating a Dynamics CRM Opportunity.

[dhomburg]

This is still broken. Here's how I got around it.

Capture some unique piece of data from the triggering event, for instance the name of the account that was modified. Write that piece of data to a file, text, excel whatever. Add a check at the beginning of the flow to compare the account name to the account name written to the file. If they match, terminate the flow, otherwise, continue.

This doesn't keep the flow from starting multiple times, but does keep it from continuing after the first event.