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A flow has two states at once: the draft being worked on, and the published version contacts are receiving. They move independently.

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Save draft, then publish

Save draft stores your work. Nothing reaches contacts. Publish promotes the draft to live. From that moment, new conversations use it.
There is no staging step between the click and the contacts. A published flow is in front of real people immediately, which is why the permission to publish is separate from the permission to edit — see Roles and permissions.
Run Validate in the builder first. It catches the problems that are cheap to fix before publishing and expensive after: a required field left empty, an outcome wired to nothing, a structure that cannot complete.

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The version badge

The builder shows the flow’s published version — Published v1 — and the flows list shows the same in its Versions column. A dash means the flow has never been published. It can be built, saved, validated and made active, and contacts will still never see it. This is the single most common reason a finished-looking flow does nothing.

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Conversations already running

Publishing does not disturb them. A session holds the version of the flow it started with and keeps it until it ends. Someone halfway through answering questions carries on with the flow they began, even while a new version is live for everyone starting fresh.
This is why publishing a fix does not repair conversations already stuck in the broken version. They finish, or time out, on the old one. Where that matters, the session lifetime in Settings is what decides how long they linger.

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Active and published

Two independent switches, and the combination is what confuses people: Deactivating stops new sessions starting. It does not unpublish, and it does not stop sessions already under way.

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Publishing again

Every publish produces a new version. The one before it is not lost — the version history is what makes a flow a versioned document rather than a file that gets overwritten. In practice this means publishing is reversible in the way that matters: returning to a previous version is a publish, not a rebuild.