by Some days ago, I started having issues in all my flows, seemingly out of nowhere. I was getting Invalid Connection errors, all of them related to my account without having changed anything substantial in it.
The Problem
The error itself doesn’t provide much context in how to solve the issue:
Invalid connection
Here’s what my two main flows look like:
I checked the connection itself in the Power Automate’s Data > Connections and seemed to be ok. No changes. They were still there with a Connected state.
The issue is triggered when you enable multi-factor authentication in your account, so Power Automate invalidates the connection. It now requires more information from the user, which makes sense. The issue was that flow should have flagged it is either “Invalid Connection” or “Not Connected” to indicate that I need to fix it.
The Solution
The solution was simple. Just go to the Flow’s Data > Connections
And re-authenticate to the same account. Power Automate will ask for your multi-factor authentication token and resets the connection. Just run your flows and voilà. Problem solved.
Photo by Briana Tozour on Unsplash
Key Takeaways
Your first instinct would be to remove the connections from the flow and re-add them, bringing a lot of work in refactoring. You would be wasting time since the primary connection would still have the same issue.
These issues with connections happen all the time, especially if you’re not in control of the security settings of your account. The administrator may rollout changes without you knowing, and this can have an impact on your flows.
Always go first to the Data > Connection and reset the connection. By doing this, you will reset your authentication with the new security policies in place and, in most cases, will solve your issue.
Have a suggestion of your own or disagree with something I said? Leave a comment or interact on Twitter and be sure to check out other Power Automate-related articles here.
Featured Photo by Sarah Kilian on Unsplash
How would this apply to flows that are within a power automate solution? We have a proxy account that we’re all using just fine. But when we go to publish our app, it gives everyone but the author the error. His connections are all set to use the proxy account.
I use my office account to create power automate flows to automate to do tasks like saving of attachments that we receive from clients on Share point, sending email notifications to clients, moving the email to a subfolder on shared mailbox etc.
The issue is i have to reauthenticate my personal account once a week and when i do it, few of the actions like the “Move Email” or the “Mark as Read or Unread” shows invalid connection (strangely the connection on the trigger that is used in the same flow – “when a new email arrives in the shared mailbox” was fine). Its a simple fix but how can I avoid it? In case, i am on a vacation or i didn’t get a chance to scan through all the flows and actions to reconnect, i don’t want the automated tasks to stop working. Any work around for this?
Instead of using my account in the setting of the actions (the three dot), can I use the shared mailbox directly?