Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Dear community,

here is sharing our awful experience from today.

We've been using Power Automate since it was MS Flow to run an important business process that many people rely on in their daily work.

There are some 20 flows, all pretty long and with non-trivial logic.

In the course of the flow, we send out email notifications. And originally we have used Outlook.com connector for this purpose.
later we have replaced it with Outlook 365 connector almost everywhere, but still had quite a lot of places running it.

Today I've opened the flow I was working on last week and was greeted with the error message saying the connector required authentication. Trying to sign it I found the user was not defined. That looked strange: I just logged in with this user and the rest of the flows were running just fine.

In the meanwhile, the flow in question could not be saved. And others that had steps using this connector, failed.

After calling our IT admin, we found that the Outlook.com was no longer available in our settings.

Turned out, there even were some publications to this extend last summer.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/outlook/

Important

This connector is no longer supporting enterprise accounts due to security policies. Existing connections will continue to work for some time, but new connections are not allowed. Enterprise accounts should use the Office 365 Outlook connector which has the same functionality as the Outlook.com connector. While we understand switching connectors is not trivial, this is necessary to allow better security controls for our users.

Apparently it was discontinued and none sent a notification to its current users.

Not via email, that is there in plain sight.

Not in the Power Automate UI, that I open daily and would surely notice.

Not via twitter account that I follow.

And not to our organization admin.

They just silently pulled the rag from under the feet and that was it.

Now I had an urgent task of replacing the steps using this connector in a number of flows.

And to make the task even more fun, the original, now disabled step, was not available for view.

So if you had an elaborate email carefully crafted, using variables and formats, it was all gone.

No way to see what was there.

It is not the first time MS makes backward--not-compatible changes. But it was the first time they were that brutal.

Be warned.