Error responding to Flow Approval in Outlook

[AngryBatVoice]

Hello,

I have an Approval Flow with an issue.  When the approver receives the email notification of the Approval Request, when they try to approve the request from within the email in Outlook or Outlook Mobile on iOS, they get a message that says "An error occurred. Try again later."  This is on a Flow that has been working flawlessly prior to this week.

If they go into Flow and approve the request there, it works.  The error message doesn't really give much to go on, and there are no errors logged on the Flow side of things.  Does anyone have any ideas on where to start with this?

[AngryBatVoice]

Yeah, I think this makes it clear that Microsoft is using the Windows 10 deployment model where their customers become their guinea pigs, and that is very not good.  

That being said, after the fiasco this issue caused last time, I simply started training my people to use the Flow App or web portal to handle their approvals.  Yes, it'd be nice if things worked the way Microsoft touts them to work, because handling the approvals through the Outlook notification is great, but rather than sitting and waiting, it was nice that this time around, no body panicked because they knew to just use Flow and I was able to have my users still productive when Microsoft shoots themselves in the foot like this.

A little clarity from Microsoft on how these issues need to be handled would be nice too.  Clearly they don't see posting in this community as a proper method of reporting an issue, but there really isn't a clear path on how to report this.  Is the problem with Flow?  Is the problem with Outlook?  Is it our responsibility to know that distinction?   If you go to the Flow web portal, click the ? icon and click Support, they do have a giant banner at the top of the screen identifying this problem, but considering things worked fine in Flow, but not in Outlook, I don't think going to Flow's support page would have been the first place I'd have checked.  They should really make it easier to report a problem than leaving the burden on the users to know which product's Support tree they need to navigate. 

[edbellman]

Approvals and Rejections are both working for me now via the Outlook client.

[LukeC]

I have some users still getting the error even with the latest build. It does work for me again personally, this morning, however.

Investigating and will report back once/if I can root cause the users who are still encountering the issue.

[Mithlogie]

Now working as of 20 minutes ago for me and my team.

[tapan_sam]

I am also facing same issue. In my case, the Office version is: 1808(Build 10730.20334).

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@AngryBatVoice wrote:

Hello,

I have an Approval Flow with an issue.  When the approver receives the email notification of the Approval Request, when they try to approve the request from within the email in Outlook or Outlook Mobile on iOS, they get a message that says "An error occurred. Try again later."  This is on a Flow that has been working flawlessly prior to this week.

If they go into Flow and approve the request there, it works.  The error message doesn't really give much to go on, and there are no errors logged on the Flow side of things.  Does anyone have any ideas on where to start with this?

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Any suggestion is much appreciated.

[AngryBatVoice]

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@tapan_sam wrote:

I am also facing same issue. In my case, the Office version is: 1808(Build 10730.20334).

Any suggestion is much appreciated.

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Microsoft seems bound and determined to continually break the approvals from Outlook.  My only suggestion to avoid continually battling this is to train your users to utilize the Flow web site on desktop, and the Flow app on mobile and process approvals from there.

[Anonymous]

I just created a basic approval process for a list when new items are added, and the Approval is working in Outlook and OWA.

Check the history of the execution and try to execute a test using the values of the last instance it failed and try to reproduce the issue, also test using different values on a different item.

Last week this very same issue was occurring to many people; including myself, where previously working workflows start having issues to get approved using these clients, however, right now seems to be working for my old WFs and even new one I configured. Not sure if this is Microsoft just taunting us deliberately in order to QA their products or is just bad CI/CD practices.

Also, I agree with  @AngryBatVoice and others on their workarround training users to use the Flow Center to approve their WFs.

[Anonymous]

As of 12/3/19, this is still an issue. The hyperlink in the Flow approval email apparently does not work for anyone but me, the creator of the flow, in the Outlook desktop client. If our engineers have to go out of their way to use the web app to do approvals, they simply won't bother to use the workflow at all. This is really a usability nightmare for us, and I'm inclined to give up on Flow altogether.

[tdhedhi]

Anyone else still experiencing this?  Flow was working until yesterday, user reporting error occasionally in trying to approve using the outlook client today.  Sometimes approval goes through after 5 or 6 attempts.

[m_jeppesen]

Unfortunately we're also experiencing this.

Both Outlook client and OWA.

Only difference is, that 5, 6 or even 10 attempts don't get it through.

[aortiz-arroyo]

I'm experiencing the same issue.

[dmarronj]

Hello everybody,

We've been facing this issue for one specific user since begining of the month.
The user receives the email and when trying to approve or reject from Outlook (desktop, web or mobile app), it fails with the "An error occurred. Try again later."  error.

The only way available for changing the status of the flow is via the Power Automate user actions' page.

Last month the user was able to approve from Outlook.

We tried reinstalling Office just in case, but it didn't help. For the same flow, if any other user receives the same email, the approve/reject buttons work without issues with the same Office version installed.

All connections for the user affected look OK in Power Automate.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

[jy8402]

Having the same issue on our end starting this week. Looks like Approvals are working on older Flows created with Approvals but new flows are receiving this error. Any solution? OWA is not sending the responses either

[mthompson]

Have your approvers tried approving via Power Automate versus Desktop Outlook or Webmail?  I provide the three options to my team if they experience issues with approvals via Power Automate.

[jy8402]

Direct Approvals in Teams or through Power Automate do currently work. Still would like to ensure approvals through email are accessible however. Hopefully this issue will resolve with an update 

[HovisMartin]

Has anyone found a solution to this problem?  I am having the same issue.  It worked fine initially and then users reported this error.