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Automation Issues?

vbyerley

I have a sheet that has a good number of automations that populate a field based on a value changing in a cell. These same automations have been working just fine since March up until today. All of a sudden they are being triggered when there is no change to the cells in question. If I click into the cell history, it hasn't changed since the form was submitted. They seem to all be going rogue… I'm curious if anyone else is experiencing issues with automations today?

Here's an example of one where I am getting the cell value changed even when "During Dry Dock" doesn't change to a different value. What would be making this happen? Again, nothing else has changed to the automations and this wasn't happening for the past 6 months until today.

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Comments

vbyerley

I have determined the exact issue - anytime an action is triggering conditional formatting, it's seeing that as a change to the cell value behind the scenes and triggering the automation. When I shut off the conditional formatting, the automations did not trigger. This is unfortunate though because I do need the conditional formatting on for different statuses without it triggering automations.

Paul Newcome

I would suggest reaching out to Support for this. Conditional Formatting should NOT be triggering automations.

vbyerley

Fully agree. I sat on hold for two and a half hours yesterday and finally got to support who is looking into the issue. The automations stopped for the ones without conditional formatting turned on, but still kept going for those that were triggering conditional formatting so I'm 100% sure that is the root cause.

Rae Ann Harris

We started seeing this happen too…it was on an established sheet that has not been changed in months. Removing the conditional formatting did stop the automations from erroneously kicking off. Before we removed all conditional formatting we were getting duplicate rows (changes were triggering the automation to copy a row every time a conditional format was triggered).

Did Smartsheet make a change to conditional formatting?

A_C

We are getting problems with automations with various clients today. Can't seem to track down the issue though.

Sheets have been running fine for >2 years. The sheets have conditional formatting, have done tests with conditional formatting enabled, disabled and deleted. This doesn't impact the issues on our sheets. Some automations run automatically as expected, however, the next automation in the sequence needs to be run manually. It is intermittent and there isn't a pattern between the ones that run ok and the ones that need to be manually run. Not much help, but just thought I'd share.

C. Peter Datz

I've also had a couple long-running Copy Row automations that just randomly stopped executing sometime on Monday afternoon… only two that I'm aware of thus far that makes this somewhat scary for our large-scale environment.

Alan P.

Just for curiosity sake, are those experiencing this problem using Table View, or Grid View? I've noticed that in Grid View, simply opening a sheet and closing it will illicit a prompt to save changes, even when nothing on the sheet was touched. Sounds like maybe a data refresh on the back end is being treated as a cell change.

vbyerley

I am using grid view.

A_C

Hi Alan, we are on grids.

Rae Ann Harris

We are using grid view also

Rae Ann Harris

Has anyone heard from or spoke to Smartsheet? I haven't seen any comments about changes being made, but we are all experiencing the same issue.

vbyerley

I waited 2 1/2 hours on hold to talk to Smartsheet tech support who said they hadn't heard of anyone else reporting the issue but walked through the issue on a Zoom call with them and they were allegedly trying to replicate the issue on their end. I haven't turned back on the conditional formatting because I'm worried it'll start sending out all the erroneous emails and breaking my sheet again.

C. Peter Datz

From my TAM:

I wanted to give you a quick update on the Workflows issue that was affecting sheet-based automations. This issue wasn't posted to the status page and I gathered more details from internal Slack conversations with Engineering.

What Happened:
Starting July 28th, Smartsheet's Workflows service experienced an issue where automated workflows were not firing in certain cases, specifically when using sheet change-based automations like move row, copy row, and copy cell operations.

Status:
The issue has been fully resolved as of August 4 at 6:30 PM CST. All Workflows services are back to normal operation.

What You Should Do:
If you had automations that weren't firing during this window, please test them now to confirm they're working properly. In most cases, they should resume normal operation automatically.

Rae Ann Harris

We were able to acutally make it happen when we turned conditional formatting back on, but it caused over 20 erroneous lines to be added to a single sheet…that we found! So, we turned it back off.

Rae Ann Harris

Do we know if the conditional formatting is still causing automations to fire incorrectly?

vbyerley

None of my automations were related to moving or copying rows or copying cells.

A_C

Our clients are still having problems. Workflows still not running.

Paul Newcome

For anyone having issues, please make sure you are submitting support tickets. Reporting it here does not necessarily meant that support will find out about this. This is just a public community forum. Submitting support tickets is the best way to ensure support is made aware of these issues.

A_C

Hi,

I raised a ticket yesterday 09767297, not heard anything back yet.

Still got the problem this morning.

Will update as I get more info.

A_C

Just checked back in, the ticket hasn't been allocated yet.

kaylabetterworkweek

Could be related, I just made this post and put in some support tickets regarding: https://community.smartsheet.com/en/discussion/147926/major-move-row-automation-issues-duplicate-rows-cell-history-lost

Shawn M.

We want to give our Community a clear update on the recent Automations issues some of you have reported — both workflows that didn't fire when expected, and cases where notifications or updates fired unexpectedly.

We've identified the root cause tied to changes we recently made. Our team has completed a thorough investigation and confirmed the underlying issue.

In the meantime, we've already taken action to stabilize things — affected workflows have been reverted to run on our proven, stable engine configuration, so you shouldn't need to take any action on your end right now.

We're actively developing a permanent fix and expect to roll it by late next week. Our team is treating this as a top priority.

Thank you for your patience and trust as we work this through!

Rae Ann Harris

Will we be notified when this is rolled out so we can keep an eye out for any new issues?

Also, do you know if, as a result of these changes, anyone has experienced automations being sent to email addresses that are not associated with any users in their Smartsheet instance? (I have opened a ticket with Support on this, but wanted to know if this is something that others also experienced).

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