Paused And Failed Flow Interviews
Paused And Failed Flow Interviews is a Setup page that displays all Flow interviews that are currently paused (waiting for user input or a scheduled resume) or have failed due to errors.
Definition
Paused And Failed Flow Interviews is a Setup page that displays all Flow interviews that are currently paused (waiting for user input or a scheduled resume) or have failed due to errors. Administrators can view error details, resume paused interviews, or delete stuck interviews to free up system resources.
In plain English
“Let's break this down in a fun way: Remember how in cartoons, there's sometimes a conveyor belt in a factory that does everything automatically? Paused And Failed Flow Interviews is like building your own mini conveyor belt in Salesforce. You set up the steps once, and then the system follows those steps every time - no one has to do the same boring task over and over again.”
Worked example
The admin at CloudSync checks Paused And Failed Flow Interviews and finds 25 failed interviews from a Record-Triggered Flow on the Case object. The error details show a "FIELD_CUSTOM_VALIDATION_EXCEPTION" caused by a validation rule conflict. She fixes the validation rule, then bulk-retries the failed interviews to process the stuck Case records.
Why Paused And Failed Flow Interviews is where stuck automations come to be diagnosed
A Flow that uses a Pause element waits for an external trigger or scheduled resume; a Flow that errors mid-execution pauses with a failure status. Either way, the interview lives on the Paused And Failed Flow Interviews page until something happens. For an admin debugging the case where a flow doesn't seem to have completed, this is where you find out whether it's still patiently waiting, whether it errored out hours ago, or whether it's stuck for a reason you need to investigate.
The reason it's worth a periodic look - not just emergency-driven - is that paused interviews can pile up unnoticed. A flow with a 30-day pause that fires often produces thousands of paused interviews; a failure mode introduced by a recent change quietly accumulates failed interviews until something else surfaces the problem. Skim the page weekly during initial flow rollout, and treat unexpected volumes here as the canary that something's drifting.
How to set up Paused And Failed Flow Interviews
Paused and Failed Flow Interviews is where stuck flow runs accumulate — flows that hit errors mid-execution, flows that waited on a screen and timed out, flows paused awaiting external input. Cleaning this list is part of routine flow admin hygiene.
- Open Setup → Paused and Failed Flow Interviews
Setup gear → Quick Find: Paused → Paused and Failed Flow Interviews.
- Review the list
Each row: Flow Name, Current Element, Started, Reason (Failed / Paused), Last Activity.
- Click into a failed interview to see the error
Detail page shows where the flow stopped, the variable values at that point, and the error message. Invaluable for debugging.
- Click Resume to retry
If the underlying issue is fixed (data corrected, dependent record exists), Resume re-runs the flow from the failed element.
- Click Delete to discard
If the interview is no longer relevant, Delete removes it. Common for old paused interviews from deactivated flows.
- Investigate the root cause
Failed interviews mean the flow has a bug. Fix the flow (in Flow Builder), reactivate, and prevent re-occurrence.
Re-runs the interview from the failed element. Only works if the underlying issue is resolved.
Discards the interview. Irreversible.
Useful when one flow is failing many interviews — filter to that flow to see the pattern.
- Failed interviews accumulate forever unless cleaned up. Hundreds of failed interviews on the same flow signal a systemic bug — fix the flow, then bulk-delete.
- Resume only works if the failure cause is resolved. Resuming on the same broken state fails again. Don't bulk-resume without diagnosing first.
- Paused interviews lock records in some configurations. A flow paused mid-DML may hold a record-edit lock — investigate before bulk-deleting paused interviews.
How organizations use Paused And Failed Flow Interviews
Use Paused and Failed Flow Interviews as the canonical worklist for the platform team's morning sync. Every paused interview either gets resumed (the user clicked back into the experience) or terminated (the user is gone, the interview is irrelevant). The page is the to-do list.
Set up an automated alert that fires when paused-and-failed counts exceed 20 in a 24-hour window. The alert routed the right person to the page during a recent incident where a renamed picklist value silently broke a major Screen Flow - the count spike caught it the same day.
Use the page to drive Flow refactor priority - any Flow with a recurring failure pattern gets escalated to the next sprint. The visibility this page gives is the difference between Flow as a closed black box and Flow as a tracked production system.
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
Test your knowledge
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