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Steps of flow disappear in designer mode

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Posted on by AS-28071818-0

When I open the design tab of a Flow, it appears totally empty, without even a prompt to add a trigger that would insinuate it accidentally got deleted. Everything shows up when I look at past runs and I can "resubmit" prior runs and they successfully run as expected.

However, when I go to "test" within designer, I get an error for every item. When I click on it, the side panel expands to fix, but missing many of the default options to fill them in that are typically there (eg the type of channel for post to teams)

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Sam_Fawzi 957 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hey @AS-28071818-0,

Is this an agent flow or a normal Power Automate flow? Also, was it working before and then suddenly stopped?
The common root cause for this kind of issue: if you delete an action whose output value is referenced further down the flow, those downstream references break. You need to trace back all the missing values, reassign the correct ones, then save, republish, and test.

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AS-28071818-0 2 on at

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@Sam_Fawzi - it's an agent flow that was previously working and still does as it's triggered by an email arriving so can go automatically (see below) which makes it even more confusing. The problem arises when I go to edit the flow and just get a blank canvas.

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Sam_Fawzi 957 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hey @AS-28071818-0

Thanks for confirming it's an agent flow, that narrows it, but I need three things before pointing you at a fix, because "blank canvas" has more than one cause here.

1. Which surface, at each stage?

Was the flow originally created in the classic Copilot Studio experience, or in the new Workflows experience?

Where are you opening it from now: Copilot Studio > Flows > Designer tab, Copilot Studio > Workflows, or Power Automate > My flows? This matters because agents and workflows created in the new experience can't be converted to classic, and editing from the new experience opens the classic designer in a separate browser tab. A flow authored on one surface and opened from the other is one of the more common ways to land on an empty canvas with runs still healthy in the background. Opening an agent flow from Power Automate > My flows is also not the supported edit path, even though it appears in the list there.

2. Standalone or in a solution?

Is the flow sitting in the default solution, or in a specific solution you or someone else created? And if it's in a custom solution, is that solution managed or unmanaged? A managed solution component behaves differently in the designer and may not be editable in place, which can present as missing or unrendered actions.

3. The connection is worth checking on its own.

The missing default options in the side panel, channel type on Post to Teams and so on, is a separate symptom from the blank canvas, and probably the more diagnostic of the two. Those dropdowns are populated from connector metadata fetched at design time, so when they come back empty the designer isn't resolving the connection at all. Things to check:

Open the flow details page and look at the connections listed. Any showing "Fix connection" or a warning icon?

Are the connections owned by you, or by whoever originally built the flow? A connection owned by another user will keep executing on the published version while failing to hydrate for you in the designer.

Has the connection lost consent, or was the password on the underlying account changed recently? Go to Power Automate > Connections, find each one, and re-authenticate.

If the flow is in a solution, check the connection references specifically rather than the connections , a broken or unmapped connection reference is a frequent culprit and doesn't always surface clearly in the UI.

One quick thing to rule out first regardless: hard refresh, then try an InPrivate window with browser extensions disabled. The designer is sensitive to stale cached session state and I've seen that alone produce a fully blank canvas.

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