📣 Delay Until – Take control of your Automation workflows

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In our previous post, we discussed how Atlassian is continuing to develop advanced capabilities in Atlassian Automation that can unlock powerful new ways to orchestrate your workflows. Now, we’re excited to introduce “Delay Until,” giving you even greater control over exactly when your automations run.

What is Delay Until?

Delay Until allows you to pause your automation workflow for a specific amount of time and/or until the right set of conditions is met. This means your workflows can pause for up to 10 days to wait for a task to be completed before progressing to the next step. Delay Until gives you the control to determine when the next tasks in your workflow happen exactly when you need them to.

What problem does it solve?

Automation workflows often need to pause and wait for the right moment—whether that’s a specific amount of time or until a key task is completed—but until now, customers had limited control over exactly when their automations should resume. This lack of flexibility can lead to bottlenecks, missed handoffs, or workflows that move ahead before teams are ready, ultimately reducing the reliability and impact of automation. With “Delay Until,” automation customers can finally orchestrate their workflows with precision, ensuring every step happens at just the right time for maximum efficiency and control.

How it works

When building or editing an automation rule, simply add the Delay Until component, which can be found under the 'PLUS: Add an advanced component’ section. You can then choose:

• A time-only delay, or a time + event condition delay.

• The duration of the delay: This can be set from 10 seconds up to 10 days.

• The Event type: At launch, you can select either a Work Item or an Alert update.

• The Event Conditions: Add up to 3 condition values.

Delay Until types

Delay Until Type	What it does
Time-only	When your automation runs, Delay Until suspends the workflow for the specified time period. It is resumed once the time period ends.
Time + Event Conditions	When your automation runs, Delay Until suspends the workflow for the specified time period or until all configured conditions are met, whichever occurs first.

How can you use Delay Until today?

Product Development Management with Rovo

Use a time-only Delay Until after your Rovo Action to ensure the Product Requirements Expert agent has completed writing draft requirements before your workflow continues.

Help desk request

When a user has created a new request but has yet to add details, delay your Help Desk workflow until they provide more details. By using Time + Event Conditions, the workflow will wait for up to 5 days for the user to respond, but if the user adds detail to their request sooner, the workflow with resume straightaway.

IT Ops

Pause your incident workflow until automated remediation steps have been taken and reviewed by your on-call team. Using Time + Event Conditions in this workflow will ensure that the automated remediation steps are completed before proceeding to the next steps, reducing your time to incident resolution.

Try it now - we’d love your feedback

Delay Until has started rolling out this week and will be available to Premium and Enterprise Edition customers by early October 2025. We can’t wait to see how you use Delay Until to supercharge your workflows. If you have any thoughts, questions, or want to share your use cases, leave a comment below.

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FAQ

Q: How long can Delay Until pause a workflow?
A: Each individual Delay Until component can pause a workflow for a minimum of 10 seconds up to 10 days (240 hours). The time period is calculated from the moment the Delay Until component is processed.

Q: How many Delay Until components can be used in the same workflow?
A: You can use as many Delay Until components as you need. However, when designing your workflow, it’s recommended to keep the rule component, rule duration, and daily processing service limits in mind.

Q: What is the maximum rule duration when using Delay Until?
A: The total duration of a rule that uses an Advanced component, like Delay Until, cannot exceed 15 days from start to end (the delay time period does not count towards processing time - see below). Example: You cannot use two 8-day time-only delays in the same rule, as this would result in a total duration of 16+days. In most cases, you can use two 7-day time-only delays in the same rule, as this would result in a total duration between 14 and 15 days.

Q: How does Delay Until impact the Daily Processing Limit?
A: The time your workflow is paused does not count towards the Daily Processing Limit. However, processing the delay component itself does count, the same way processing other components like Actions does already.

Q: Will service limits for Delay Until and total rule duration be increased in the future?
A: Yes, we are planning to increase these in future releases - please keep an eye on the Cloud Roadmap. We are always keen to better understand what use cases longer delays/rules you are looking to solve, so please drop a comment below.

Q: Will more Event types and Condition options be available in the future?

A: Yes, we are planning to support more event types and condition options in future releases. Today, Delay Until supports Work Item or an Alert update event types + 3 Conditions with AND logic.

[Brandon Davies]

Great new updates! Always excited to see more automation tools native to the Atlassian ecosystem.

[Hans Polder _Devoteam_]

Awesome! No longer, we'll have to 'hope for the best' with some sequential running automation rules. :))