What happens to moderation while disconnected

While an account is disconnected, moderation pauses for that account’s pages: no new comment is pulled in, so no Workflow runs, and nothing is hidden, replied to, flagged, or deleted. Comments posted during the outage are not processed in real time — but in the normal case they are not lost either. When you reconnect, the app pulls in the backlog and runs your Workflows on it retroactively. The exception is at the bottom of this page: comments the platform no longer returns by the time you reconnect are missed permanently.

Comments stay public during the gap

A disconnected account only stops your moderation. The comments themselves are still live on Facebook or Instagram the whole time. Anything a Workflow would have hidden or deleted stays visible to your audience until moderation resumes and processes the backlog.

What “disconnected” means here

An account is disconnected when its Meta access is no longer valid. In Accounts, that account shows a red Error badge and a banner with a Reconnect account button, and its pages show Ingestion: Inactive. Ingestion is the app pulling comments in from the platform; while it is inactive, there is nothing for a Workflow to act on.

Disconnection is per account, not global. Your other connected accounts keep moderating normally.

For how accounts reach this state and how to fix it, see Fixing a disconnected account.

The banner on a disconnected account; its pages stop pulling in comments until you reconnect.

Are comments queued or missed?

Queued, in the normal case. The app tracks how far it has read each page. While the page is disconnected, that marker does not move — it stays at the last comment successfully pulled in before the outage. New comments keep arriving on the platform, but the app is not reading them yet.

When you reconnect, the next sync reads forward from that marker and pulls in everything posted during the gap. Those comments are then processed by your Workflows exactly as if they had just arrived. Already-seen comments are deduplicated, so reconnecting does not create repeats.

This backfill is why a short disconnection is usually recoverable: the work is deferred, not thrown away.

Some outage comments can be missed permanently

Backfill only reaches as far back as the platform still returns. Comments that fall outside Meta’s retrievable window before you reconnect — or if you never reconnect at all — are not recovered. The app does not guarantee a comment posted during a long outage is still fetchable. Treat a fast reconnect as the mitigation, not an optional cleanup.

Why reconnect speed is the real control

Because the risk is the platform’s own retrievable window, the length of the outage is what determines whether you lose anything:

• Reconnect within minutes or hours: the backlog is almost always still fetchable, and Workflows catch up on it.
• Reconnect after a long delay: older comments from early in the gap may no longer be returned by Meta, and those are gone from the app’s point of view.

Reconnect as soon as you see the Error state. The reconnect steps are in Fixing a disconnected account.

How you find out

The first time the app tries to read one of the account’s pages and Meta refuses the access, the app emails a reconnect reminder to the person who connected the account. The email goes out within moments of that refusal, not on a daily digest. The account also shows Error on Accounts, and the Home page lists the paused pages. There is no push notification for a disconnect, so if nobody watches that inbox, check Accounts or Home from time to time.

What the activity log shows for the gap

Two surfaces record the outage, and they show different things:

• The account Activity feed (open the account in Accounts, section Activity) records the lifecycle events: the disconnect, the error, and later the reconnect. This is where you confirm when the gap started and ended.
• The Audit Log (Analytics → Audit Log) records Workflow activity — which Workflow fired on which comment. During the gap it shows no entries for that page’s comments, because no comments were pulled in to act on. After you reconnect, the backfilled comments are processed and appear in the Audit Log then.

So the gap does not silently vanish: the Activity feed marks its boundaries, and the absence of Audit Log entries for that page during the gap reflects that moderation genuinely paused rather than acted invisibly.

An Audit Log entry’s time is when the Workflow acted, not when the comment was posted. Backfilled comments are processed after you reconnect, so their entries carry reconnect-time timestamps and appear together, after the gap — not spread across it. To see when one of those comments was actually posted, open it in the Inbox.

After reconnect: confirm moderation resumed

Once you reconnect, verify the catch-up actually ran:

• The account badge reads Active (green).
• The account’s pages show Ingestion: Active, and Last monitored updates to a recent time on the next sync.
• Backfilled comments appear in the Inbox and, once processed, in the Audit Log.

Backfill can take a few minutes to appear after reconnect.

A backfilled backlog costs you nothing to receive

Ingestion is unlimited and unmetered, so the size of the backlog is irrelevant to your bill — a long outage does not arrive as a charge. What counts is what your Workflows then do with it: outbound automations (replies, DMs, likes) count against your plan’s included automations for the month they run in, and hides, deletes and approvals never count at all. See How automation billing works.

Related

• Fixing a disconnected account
• Why connections expire
• How automation billing works
• Restoring a comment