Introduction

This article describes Power Automate connections and the lifetimes for Power Automate connections to Microsoft and Google products.

Contents

• Microsoft Lifetime Information
• Google Lifetime Information

Explanation

Power Automate uses connections to access data from other applications while building flows. Some commonly used connections are SharePoint, SQL Server, Microsoft 365, OneDrive for Business, and Excel – to name a few.

Power Automate connections will expire. They expire based on the token's lifetime. This lifetime will vary by provider. For example, a token issued by Google will be different and have a different lifetime than one issued by Microsoft.

In general, connections are mostly designed to persist indefinitely. However, app developers cannot rely on this as it is not guaranteed.

Top of page

Microsoft Lifetime Information

Microsoft has implemented some default lifetimes. These defaults apply to Virginia Tech's Power Automate license. To see more detail about default lifetimes, see Recommendations for conditional access and multi-factor authentication in Microsoft Flow. These default lifetimes are:

• MaxInactiveTime: 90 days - If any Flow connection is idle (unused by Flow runs) for longer than this timespan, any new Flow run after the expiry time fails.
• MaxAgeMultiFactor: Until-Revoked - This setting controls how long multi-factor refresh tokens (the kind of tokens that are used in Flow connections) are valid. The default setting means that there is effectively no limit on how long a Flow connection can be used – unless a tenant admin specifically revokes the user's access. What does this mean for your flow connections? As long as the flow is running once every 90 days, the connections should remain working indefinitely until revoked.

Top of page

Google Lifetime Information

Google refresh tokens expire when:

• The user of your app has revoked its access,
• The refresh token has not been used for six months,
• The user changed passwords, and the refresh token contains Gmail scopes, or
• The user account has exceeded a maximum number of granted (live) refresh tokens.

Top of page