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Automations not triggering

SueinSpain

Hi All,

We currently have a live issue with automations that are unchanged and have been running successfully for months & even years.

I am trying to acertain whether it is just in our company that these are failing or if it is platform-wide.

In summary, we often use automations on new records either by triggering if an automated field is any value e.g. Unique Ref changes to Any Value or if a field only filled in by a form but is a hidden field e.g. Status changes to "New". Then either a dat is recorded, a cell changed or request an update is sent.

These have suddenly stopped working last week. However, if I run the automations manually for the records "missed" then it still runs OK and carries out the operation.

I have also found another instance where a condition of a field contain "No" or blank contact Inventory otherwise contact controlled drugs has suddenly started sending all blanks to controlled drugs. I've change the logic to be "not = Yes" inventory "= Yes" controlled drugs and this has fixed this problem.

I have 417 smartsheets many with 30+ automations so checking through them all is proving challenging and I wondered if anyone else is having a problem?

They do seem to trigger if it is a field where the requester actually enters a value into a field e.g. Raised By rather than an auto generated field or hidden field.

If you can let me know as this is a crisis for us that I'm am firefighting and my support tickets are remaining unassigned with smartsheet support despite having premium support. So I want to give them as much information as possible when they do finally look at them.

Many thanks as always for your support and generosity in helping & sharing

Kindest regards

Sue

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Mark K

YES!!

We have multiple large sheets where the automations responsible for entering default values when a new row is created stopped firing sometime last week. If we manually run the automation on the affected row, the default values populate correctly.

As of today, that particular issue appears to be working again. However, we are now seeing a new problem: rows that were added in the past are triggering fresh email notifications to managers, asking them to update forms they have already completed. These notifications should only be sent when a new row is initially created.

In addition, on another sheet, rows are being moved to a different sheet when they should not be.

We are receiving dozens of emails from managers asking why they are getting requests to complete forms they have already submitted, creating significant confusion and disruption.

We also have Premium Support, and our ticket is currently listed under "Support: Unassigned Backlog."

Stop the craziness!

bieng25

I will second this - just this morning I had every automation trigger on all rows for a worksheet at the same time. I'm not sure what it is causing this issue but it's spamming people's inboxes with requests that have already been long completed.

Mark K

By chance was this at 11:30am EST on 8/11? That is when our triggers started sending duplicate notifications.

bieng25

9:09 AM PST or 12:09 EST. It's been total madness, we have over a hundred entries that retriggered.

bieng25

What a mess. I'm glad it's not a mystery at least, but my users complain enough about emails as it is

JCarrico

I'm glad there is an update and that the previous issue of automation not running is "fixed" but this happened last week as well so I'm concerned with stability. Am I alone in thinking that customers should have been notified that there was an issue?

SueinSpain

Yes absolutely - smartsheet finally agreed they had a problem later afternoon today UK time - I had been reporting it since last Friday and still In Progress and unassigned tickets.

Suddenly after 5pm all the automations have resent the update requests that we have been running manually to overcome.

Absolute carnage and I will spend the rest of the week firefighting everyone asking "is this a problem or why is it happening"

Communications and support from Smartsheet have been rubbish

a) it would be nice to know there might be a problem

b) what the problem was

c) what the fix was and when put in place

d) consequences

VERY disappointed in how this has been handled and the inability for any of us to get this raised, especially as it appears platform-wide

Rae Ann Harris

I have been on a number of threads regarding automations for the past two weeks. I find it odd and disappointingi that so many have been talking about these issues, and yet it wasn't until yesterday at 1251PDT that a notification was sent out by Smartsheet noting an incident.

I am surprised that Smartsheet does not have someone responsible for monitoring their Community board for issues being experienced across the platform.

Rae Ann Harris

We should have been notified a lot sooner than yesterday! We have made changes, where we could, to change triggers to our automations so

Rae Ann Harris

We noticed that conditional formatting was being considered a change to a row and triggering our automation. This was not the case prior to last week.

rgarcia

Smartsheet should have notified the platform administrators. Errors cost money, compromise operations, and cause massive confusion across the organization. As the IT lead, I'm currently evaluating whether the platform is reliable enough to manage critical processes.

Charlotte Patey

I have an open help case with smartsheets with a similar issue.

In my case, I have multiple staff timesheets with two automations: the first one copies data from rows to another collation sheet and a second one clears the information. The moving row is now taking so long the second automation is running before it finishes which mean the data moved is half removed.

As in your case, the automations have worked perfectly for three plus years. They stopped working properly towards the end of July. At the time a few posts mentioned they were suddenly being triggered by conditional formatting…

EJH

I have automations failing for a month now that we've been using for over 2 years now. Yesterday they briefly worked. Tried today and no longer working again. Created case almost one month ago, never was contacted by customer support. Back in April had similar issues.

david.crabtree

I have one workflow we have been using for years. Nothing has changed, on it or any other sheet related to this one. The workflow says when a status has been reached, the row moves to another sheet. No rows move back to this sheet ever, yet, it gives me an error saying there is an infinite loop. I know this is not true because i move the rows manually and they never come back.

Amy.

Same here, Automations not triggering.

JakubHermanos

Same here. We're experiencing this across multiple sheets - workflows that have been running reliably for a long time simply don't trigger anymore, even though all conditions are met. Manually recreating the workflow fixes it temporarily, but after about a day it stops firing again.

We also had one particularly concerning incident: a "Change cell value" automation triggered by "When rows are added" suddenly modified values on rows that had been sitting in the sheet for several days - clearly not newly added. So we're seeing both missed triggers and false triggers on old rows.

david.crabtree

I reactivated my automation and already had two failures since their status update that everything should be fixed. Anybody else having issues. They all worked for about 24 hours, then started acting up again this morning.

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