What Actually Happens When Make Workflows Go Sideways

Table of Contents

1. Setting up your first scenario in Make without breaking something

This part always looks easy right up until it isn’t. You drag a trigger into the canvas—maybe something like “Watch for new rows in Google Sheets”—and it connects, so you think it’s fine. But half the time, you forget that Make runs scenarios differently from Zapier: you actually have to hit Run once manually to test it, and pray nothing explodes or, worse, silently fails.

I was helping a client last week who duplicated an older invoice automation to reuse it. Looked identical. Their Google Sheet didn’t update. Turns out, the duplicated scenario had kept its original spreadsheet ID deep in the module settings. You have to click into the tiny settings icon on the module itself and re-select the spreadsheet manually. It never prompts you to change these when cloning a scenario.

There’s no alert for a spreadsheet mismatch, by the way. The scenario just runs in the background with old data, like it’s gaslighting you.

Make doesn’t warn you about a lot of these passive duplicates—it’ll happily fork a scenario with hardcoded IDs and tokens if you let it. I wish the UI just grayed out or flagged any lingering IDs when copying scenarios, especially if it belongs to a different workspace or context. But nope.

2. Why Make trigger modules behave differently than filters expect

Another thing Make doesn’t shout about: trigger modules don’t always send their output data the way you think. Especially when the data structure comes from apps with complex APIs. I remember hacking together a quick Airtable-to-Slack scenario. Seemed dead simple: a new record in Airtable triggers a Slack message. I set up a filter to only run if the status column was “Ready to ship.” It never fired.

After 90 minutes of poking around the execution logs, it hit me: the trigger was passing status back as a nested object. The value wasn’t “Ready to ship”—it was { name: "Ready to ship" }. So that equals filter? Totally ignored it.

Here’s the behavioral edge case: even though the execution log shows the value as a string (like “Ready to ship”), the internal match in filters traces the API structure, not the render display. So no, your equality filter won’t match unless you manually convert it or drill into the specific status.name field.

Now I just run every new filter test against a dummy run with a known good record, even if it means creating a fake Airtable line just to push it through. The logs are helpful—but they don’t always show you the structure that the logic engine is actually using.

3. When Make ignores updated fields because of polling limits

This one wrecked an entire HR scenario I built in January. We had Make watching a Notion database for status changes. The idea was: once someone’s hiring status flipped to “Offer Accepted,” it should create three onboarding docs in Google Drive and fire off some Slack pings. Worked fine, right up until people started emailing us like “hey… I signed my offer four days ago.”

Make had quietly stopped detecting changes. I dug into the logs thinking it was a Slack failure or a Drive limit. Nope—the Notion trigger had simply skipped over the edited entries. Turns out, the “Watch database items” module in Make pulls snapshots by created time only, or sometimes by the last edited time—but it doesn’t monitor for edits unless you explicitly select that mode.

Undocumented behavior here: if your trigger doesn’t include the edited time or you forgot to add a relevant updated timestamp into the DB, Make will miss all edits. Even if the value changed to something that would trigger.

Pair that with Make’s quiet polling windows (some trigger modules have 15-minute intervals but only pick up the last 10 rows), and any status change older than that gets lost.

Always add a last-edited timestamp column in apps like Airtable or Notion
Force scenario triggers to sort by descending edit time if possible
Test with entries updated 5+ minutes ago, not just fresh ones
Check the trigger module’s tooltip for hidden limitations
Monitor Make run history weekly in the first month of launch
Use scenario log payloads to verify what was actually received

4. Reusing token-based modules without regenerating credentials

This one blew up a workflow we were demoing live for a client. We’d cloned a scenario that posted Slack onboarding checklists. Problem: the Slack module inside still had an old OAuth token tied to my test account, not their workspace. It hadn’t been obvious because Make shows the account nickname, but that nickname was just labeled “Slack” in both cases. I hadn’t renamed it when authorizing.

The scenario ran, pretended it worked, and then failed silently—not because the token was invalid, but because it lacked permission to post in that team’s #hiring channel. No red error in Make. No Slack message. Just a skipped step with zero log detail.

If you reuse an account module from a duplicated scenario, double-check every auth label—even if it looks the same. Especially if the app supports multiple workspaces or tenants like Slack, Google, or Notion.

I’ve started adding emojis or very specific tags to my Make app connection names (like “Slack – HR Bot ” vs. “Slack – Client X 🚨”) just so I catch these during rebuilds. But there’s no Make-native way to flag mismatched connections when scenarios are cloned. I wish there were a checklist pop-up: “This scenario uses 3 authorized connections. Review them?”

5. Understanding Make’s quiet error swallowing in conditional branches

I only caught this one because of an especially stubborn Mailchimp export loop. It worked fine in the first few runs, then just stopped sending after 50 records. No warnings. The module still showed a green check.

The reason? I had a router with two branches: one for subscribers who clicked a certain link (send a promo email), and one for those who didn’t (move to a waitlist in Airtable). The Airtable module had a misconfigured base—like, a literal typo in the base ID from a variable. But instead of failing, that module just quietly skipped. Make treats most Airtable write errors as non-blocking inside grouped output routes.

This is what the log showed:

{
  "route": "Waitlist Path",
  "Airtable Create Record": "SKIPPED",
  "reason": "Execution not possible with current input"
}

Except the variable supplying the Base ID wasn’t even listed as blank—it had part of the real base ID. So no 401, no 404, no red flags. Just a green “okay” with no outcome.

What I now do with any Make branch where one failure could lead to invisible silence:

Insert a debug log step right after branches that matter (just a simple webhook log)
Use the built-in Tools → Break/Error module if required fields are empty
Don’t let Airtable or Coda silently fail—wrap their modules in 1-step validations first

6. Scheduling bugs when using multiple time-based triggers

This might be a Make platform bug or just bad scheduling behavior, but it keeps happening on the repeat schedule module. Set up two weekly triggers—not in the same scenario, two different scenarios—that both run at 9:00am Monday. One pulls data from Typeform, the other updates a Notion dashboard. After a few weeks, one of them starts firing twice. Sometimes once at 9:00:11, then again at 9:01:21. Other times, not at all.

No, it’s not timezone mismatch. I’ve checked that three times. What I suspect is happening: Make’s background engine occasionally misreads simultaneous time triggers when multiple scenarios share a webhook or rate limit window. But there’s no documentation that admits this.

It smells like what used to happen with Webflow scheduler bugs or ghosted n8n queue misfires: multiple time jobs collide just slightly and the system re-queues one of them.

“First run fired at 9:00:00. Second run skipped at 9:00:01 due to interval limit. Triggering again at 9:01:00.”

That’s a real log line. Happens maybe one out of eight runs. I now stagger every scheduled Make scenario by at least 2 minutes—like one at 8:58, the other at 9:01. It’s dumb, but it’s stable.

7. How modules retain internal IDs even when apps are reauthorized

This one’s sneaky as hell. Let’s say you disconnect your Airtable account from Make and reconnect with a new token. Maybe someone on your team rotated API keys, or you moved to a service account. You’d assume that reconnecting the app means the modules now pull everything fresh. Nope.

Make holds onto some of the underlying table IDs and field mappings, even after reauth.

I’ve tested this. I had two tables with same name—”Contacts”—from two different Airtable bases. Reauth’d Make with a different API key pointing to the new base. The module still rendered fields from the old base. It would accept records but save them in the wrong place. Absolutely infuriating.

Quick fix: in any scenario where you reauth the connection, delete the old module and add it again from scratch. Otherwise those invisible IDs linger behind the scenes. UI looks fine. Field previews are correct. But the writes hit the prior base ID from legacy storage. It’s not cached—it’s stored.

I now do one paranoid step when reconnecting:

Delete any affected modules that use the connection
Clear the scenario cache from the editor (yes, just close and reopen)
Create a fresh app connection labeled with date and token type
Re-add each module by hand and compare the Execution Preview

8. Autogenerated cycles that never finish because iterator defaults change

This one has screwed me twice. Both times, using the “Iterator” module to break apart a webhook payload from a list—like a JSON batch from Stripe invoices. The standard pattern is: webhook → iterator → per-item action. Problem is, if your incoming payload is not actually an array but a single object mislabeled as a list, Make just… cycles once and completes. No errors.

First time I saw this, I assumed my webhook parser was messed up. Turns out, Make’s Iterator assumes success if it gets any response with no errors, even if the array only had 1 flattened key like { line_items: { item_1: data_here } } instead of a true array.

I used the JSON module to debug it:

{
  "line_items": {
    "item_1": {...},
    "item_2": {...}
  }
}

I thought that was a valid iterable format. Nope—Make wants line_items: [ {...}, {...} ]. Otherwise the Iterator module never reaches the second cycle. It counts that as success even though the length is one and the shape is wrong.

This is especially painful when the incoming payload can vary. I’ve started preprocessing every iterable webhook with a validation script that repacks into a clean array, even if it’s just wrapping a single object like:

{
  "items": Array.isArray(data.items) ? data.items : [data.items]
}