When you use connectors in Power Automate you may have seen broken connections.
Reasons for broken connections
Sometimes things have gone wrong within the connection and Flow will report this to you. I’m trying to collect the reasons and the how to fix the connection in this post. If you have found any other reasons feel free to leave a comment at the end of this post.
Fix connection
You might find that you get these blue Fix connection messages in your connections overview.
Most of these cases it is just a matter of clicking the fix connection link supply a password and then your connection will be marked as connected again.
You might also find that when you visit https://flow.microsoft.com you get the following message saying
We have found X of your connections in a disconnected stat. Would you like to fix them now?
And then you might even find many broken connections as shown below after I clicked on the Fix button. This is quite useful as you now only get the broken connection
Unlike earlier the connected connection are not listed in the fix overview but still this doesn’t look good!
Using FlowStudio you will also find all the broken connections.
And now when you right click on the broken connection and select connection JSON you will get the following
This connection is not authenticated
Failed to refresh access token for service
Failed to refresh access token for service means that you will need to supply your username and password again. The error message will supply you with what the connection cannot get an access token for. For different connectors you might get a slight variation of the message. for example the SharePoint connector will give you
Further thoughts
I’m sure there will be more reasons for connections to be broken. When connections break it can make your system struggle. To help others please do leave your experiences in a comment below so that others can benefit from your lessons.
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Pieter Veenstra
Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There's a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I'm the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I've been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. SharePains is not just any blog run by a Microsoft MVP. Have you ever used Try-Catch in Power Automate? The original post about Try-Catch in Power Automate can still be found on this site, https://sharepains.com/2018/02/07/try-catch-finally-in-power-automate-flow/ Or have you ever used the Pieter’s method to avoid variables and speed up your flows? https://sharepains.com/2020/03/11/pieters-method-for-advanced-in-flows/ You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com
Pieter Veenstra
Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There's a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I'm the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I've been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. SharePains is not just any blog run by a Microsoft MVP. Have you ever used Try-Catch in Power Automate? The original post about Try-Catch in Power Automate can still be found on this site, https://sharepains.com/2018/02/07/try-catch-finally-in-power-automate-flow/ Or have you ever used the Pieter’s method to avoid variables and speed up your flows? https://sharepains.com/2020/03/11/pieters-method-for-advanced-in-flows/ You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com
I’ve seen two-factor authentication leading to broken connections in Flow, and the apparent solution was to use a service account that doesn’t have 2FA enabled.
Yes, I agree, for connections I would also use accounts that don’t have MFA enabled.
We have flows with this error that are started from power apps, so my understanding is that the connections are run using the user’s credentials, not the flow creators.
How do we handle this if the users need to fix their connections?
Hi Chad, just a quick idea. Maybe a flow could scan for broken connections and tell the users where to go to fix the connections via an email alert.
There are thoroughly legitimate reasons these connections are broken (such as when a password is reset), but often I only discover the broken connections when the flow breaks and the actions the flow was supposed to process have failed. This approach seems very reactive, and is an Achille’s heel for the Power Platform. I had thought using accounts with a non-expiring password (effectively a service account) would prevent this issue, but I still get broken connections even with such accounts.