A business had an automation that copied new enquiries into a shared tracking list. It had run quietly for over a year. Then someone asked why the list had nothing in it since March.
The flow had switched itself off. A connection it depended on had expired, the runs began failing, and after a run of consecutive failures the platform disabled it automatically.
This was a Power Automate flow, where the behaviour is documented and by design: a flow that fails continuously for long enough is turned off rather than left retrying forever. Most automation platforms do something similar. Whether anyone finds out is a separate question, and that is the part that actually caused the damage here.
Why nobody noticed
Failure notices went to the person who originally built it, into a folder they had long since stopped reading. Nothing appeared anywhere the team looked.
And the symptom was an absence. Enquiries still arrived by email, so the business kept functioning. The tracking list simply stopped filling, and an empty list looks the same as a quiet month.
The fix, and the better fix
Reauthorising the connection and switching the flow back on took ten minutes. The three months of missing records had to be rebuilt by hand from the mailbox, which took considerably longer.
The better fix was two changes. Failure notifications now go to a shared address rather than an individual, so they survive somebody moving on. And the flow runs under an account that belongs to the business rather than to a person.
Worth doing today
Open your automation platform and look at the list of flows. Check two things for each: when it last ran successfully, and whose account it runs under.
Anything running under a departed employee is already broken or about to be. Anything that has not run in months is worth investigating before someone asks about it.
This is the general case rather than a one-off, and it is worth reading about properly: a stopped automation announces nothing, which is what makes it the expensive kind of failure.
If there are things running in your business and nobody is sure what they are or whose account they use, describe what you know about them. That is a common position and a solvable one.