Hello @Tim Dutcher - Thank you for posting here on MS Q&A about your recent experience! And we are sorry to hear about the inconvenience. It sounds like a front-end UX glitch due to a hanging networking call between the browser and Azure..are you hitting this issue consistently or too frequently? please share with us the relevant details and we'd happy to reproduce & investigate.
Save operation shouldn't really take that long though, and if it starts taking longer than a few mins, I'd stop waiting and start over. I also found it easier to get in the habit of hitting save after every small change, it seems to help keep the connections active. You can put together all kinds of workflows (that otherwise would take a long time developing in code-based experiences) in the designer mode in Azure Portal very quickly but when working on a production or mission-critical workflow, it'd be better to work in Visual Studio or VS Code, and maybe introduce version control and an automated CI/CD deployment as needed.