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Flow ran last night but not sure which flow, why or for what exactly

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Posted on by Jcar1

I hate to post this but want to see if anyone has seen something like this happen to provide some insight. I have a manually triggered flow to approve details housed on a Sharepoint list. Last night after business hours a flow triggered approximately 195 times but here are all the mysteries I have:

It does not show up in the flow history of any of my new hire flows which is what it looks like it is. My first place I went was to review the run history to see if I could figure out what triggered it.
It looks like the approval only came to me and not everyone that is supposed to receive the approval. I am thankful for that but that is not how the approval is set up. I am still waiting to confirm this piece but from my approval history in Teams it does not look like it sent to anyone other than me.
My approval history in teams says that it was requested by me.
It is a manually triggered flow (again not sure which one but both new hire approval processes are manually triggered).
It does not appear to have run for every old record on the SharePoint list as there are 350+ on there. I haven't dug into which ones ran or not because I am just not sure it is a good use of my time yet.

That is my initial list of questions I have to see what you very intelligent people might be able to provide any potential insight for me.

Thanks in advance.

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DB-03081613-0 2 on at

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Very sorry to see this go unanswered, as something nearly identical happened to me this weekend. 125 approval requests generated in the middle of the night, doesn't show up in the run history. Hoping someone will answer this soon!

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David_MA 15,273 Super User 2026 Season 2 on at

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Is the workflow shared with anyone, or is it called by any other workflows as a child workflow or in a Power App?

Aside from one of those scenarios, I've never seen a manually triggered flow simply start running on its own.

If it is being used as a child flow, check the trigger inputs/outputs. The trigger headers contain information that can help trace the calling flow. For example:

x-ms-workflow-name = the ID of the flow that called the child flow.

x-ms-workflow-operation-name = the name of the action in the parent flow that called the child flow.

An easy way to open the calling flow is to open any flow in the same environment and replace the flow ID in the URL with the value from x-ms-workflow-name. If you find those headers in the trigger output, they can usually tell you exactly which flow and action invoked the child flow.

In opening of the outputs of this flow run, I can trace that this workflow called the above run: Contract Execution Contract Entry Assigned WF5.

If the flow is manually triggered, it will tell you who triggered it along with other details. Here is where it tells you who triggered it:

        "x-ms-user-name": "**************, David",

        "x-ms-user-name-encoded": "***********",

        "x-ms-user-email": "David.***********@*************.com",

        "x-ms-user-email-encoded": "R**********************=",

        "x-ms-user-timestamp": "2026-07-16T13:18:13.8167193Z",

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