Flow suddenly taking more than 2–3 hours to run instead of 15 minutes, no changes made

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Posted on by BC-09011503-0

Hi everyone,

I am experiencing a sudden and severe performance issue with one of my automated cloud flows.

For months, this flow has consistently completed in about **15 to 18 minutes**. However, starting today, the same flow now takes **over 1–2 hours** to run, and in most cases it gets “stuck” until I manually cancel the execution. I have **not made any changes** to the flow.

Below is the current execution history:

- Multiple runs now lasting **49 minutes**, **1h 42m**, **2h 57m**, etc.

- Older runs (yesterday and previous weeks) still show the usual **16–18 minutes** duration.

- No errors are reported — the flow simply keeps running indefinitely until I cancel it.

I have already checked the following:

- The Excel file and SharePoint list used by the flow have not changed.

- No flow modifications.

Has anyone experienced a similar sudden slowdown?

Could this be related to temporary performance degradation on SharePoint/Excel connectors, service throttling, or hidden data usage limits?

Any advice on how to diagnose this kind of issue would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

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Power Automate Desktop

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lbendlin 8,705 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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How many other users are in your Power Platform environment? Ask your M365 admin to look at the recent logs to see if there was any change in system load.

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BC-09011503-0 2 on at

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Hi, thank you for your reply.

I also wanted to add an additional detail that might be relevant to your question about the number of users in the environment:

two other colleagues attempted to run the same flow on the same day when the slowdown occurred. So there were indeed multiple users triggering executions in a short timeframe.

As an update, I ran the flow again today (two days later), and it completed in about 16 minutes, which is back to the normal performance.

Since no changes were made to the flow or to the data sources, it seems likely that the issue was caused by temporary load or throttling in our Power Platform environment.

I will still ask our M365 admin to check the environment logs, but for now everything appears to be running correctly again.

Thanks again for your help!

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Michael E. Gernaey 53,963 Moderator on at

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HI @BC-09011503-0

If you review the actual Flow, I am assuming you are doing some looping. I would

1) open the Flow run and look for the grouped area of actions that are taking the time

2) look for retries

3) look through your loop(if its an apply to each) via the < and > to see if all or some are taking time.

To answer a question unfortunately this generically requires seeing what in your flow no taking the actual time.

It could be related to some End Point you are calling that we do not know about.

Also when you mention the excel file, nothing that caching and updates are a massive time issue when a file is IN SharePoint, is someone else touching the file and you don't know it?

Are there multiple instances running from another (test/dev) that accidentally are pointing at your flow.

Check the flow run, it will tell you all you need to know via the actions that are taking the time. From there it will be easy to deduce.

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CU07012140-0 14 on at

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Hi,

This sounds to me as a license issue. Which license do you have?

Performance degradation in Power Automate cloud flows can absolutely be a license issue, often related to hitting API action limits or using premium connectors without proper licensing, but it can also stem from flow design, shared service capacity constraints, or ownership changes, so checking flow details and your license plan is crucial. Licensing affects the number of actions allowed per user/day and flow trigger frequency.

Cheers.

Servan

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