It was a little ‘feature’ introduced in the February 2026 release for Customer Insights – Journeys, and one that has probably gone by un-noticed by many users, but is slowly starting to pop up as a surprise to people. If you don’t use a segment for 30 days, it will be made expired. You haven’t lost it, but lord it can cause confusion! This post will walk through the logic from Microsoft, and how you can get it back and start using it again. Definitely one for you to be aware of if you are using Customer Insights – Journeys!
First, it’s not all that obvious which Segments are expired. Depending on views you are using to look at your list of Segments, if you have the Status Reason or Status fields in the views, you would see them listed as Inactive.
Going in to one, all of a sudden you see this horrible Expired indicator and that your record is read only (meaning you can’t do anything with it).
First, why is this happening? Well you can read more about it here in the official documentation from Microsoft, but this is the important part.
Segments no longer used in any active journey: Segment moves to a 24‑hour refresh cycle. If it remains unused for 30 days, it transitions to the Expired state, where it’s no longer evaluated and doesn’t count toward segment limits, helping optimize performance.
So how do we get it back so we can use it? Open up the Segment and click the Activate option from the top right. Most people (understandably so) are going to select the Status Reason of Ready to use, then click Activate.
And then you get a horrifying error!
It’s OK, instead just make sure you select the Status Reason of Draft instead. There are lots of things that need to go on in the background and trying to take it directly to Ready to use just doesn’t work. In an ideal world you wouldn’t even be able to pick that option, but it is what it is right?
Once you have activated it, you can now click the Ready to use button to get it Live again.
UPDATE: 15th APRIL 2026
After fiddling about, I found a way to get the Expired segments back to Ready to use in bulk. When we go to the list of segments, we are actually looking at the records from the msdynmkt_virtualsegment table. The record that is expired is from the msdynmkt_segmentdefinition table, so that is what needs updating. You can force a view to see all of those records using something like this, or just open a view of segments and remove everything from msdynmkt_virtualsegment to the end of the URL and then just add in msdynmkt_segmentdefinition instead:
YOUR-D365-URL/main.aspx?appid=YOUR-CIJ-APP-ID&pagetype=entitylist&etn=msdynmkt_segmentdefinition
This will give you the usual ribbon with the buttons you need to get these fixed. Select your Expired ones and then click Activate. DO NOT be tempted to set the Status Reason to Ready to use first, pick Draft. You’ll get an error otherwise (see further up this blog). Change to Draft, then select them again, Activate and pick Ready to use. That should sort them out for you so they are no longer expired.
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