Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hi everyone,

we are currently facing an issue across multiple Power Apps that we have not been able to resolve so far.

We are intermittently encountering an error (see screenshot attached, showing a grey screen with a small error icon), but the behavior is inconsistent and difficult to reproduce.

Problem description:

The error occurs across different apps that belong to different SharePoint lists, not just a single one
It affects multiple users and different devices
It is not reliably reproducible
Sometimes the app runs for a few seconds up to several minutes before the error appears
In other cases, the error does not occur at all

What we have checked so far:

Initially, we suspected an overloaded SharePoint list as a potential cause. However, even after significantly reducing/clearing the list, the issue still persists
We also used the Power Apps Monitor / diagnostics tools, but no clear or helpful error messages were identified

At the moment, we are struggling to identify the root cause.

Has anyone experienced similar behavior in Power Apps?

Could this be related to SharePoint performance, session issues, or something else entirely?

Any ideas, experiences, or hints would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

Categories:

Building Power Apps

Microsoft Dataverse with Power Apps

Error handling

General topics

Hi there,

That generic grey screen with the sad-face icon is Power Apps’ fallback for an unhandled runtime error, so the goal is to surface the actual underlying error. Since it’s intermittent and spans multiple apps/lists, here are the documented tools that will help you pinpoint it.

1. Capture the real error with App.OnError

The OnError property captures all unhandled errors in your app. Add a formula there to log what’s failing - for example, store the error details in a collection (and optionally Notify() them) so that next time the grey screen would appear, you instead capture the message, source, and observed value. Also confirm formula-level error handling is turned on in app Settings (on by default for new apps, but some older apps have it off). Wrapping risky data calls in IfError / IsError also lets you handle failures gracefully instead of crashing the screen.

2. Reproduce against a live session with Live monitor

Run Live monitor against the published app while a user reproduces the issue. It streams every event, formula evaluation, and network/connector call in the session, so you can see exactly which operation fails (and its status code) in the moments before the grey screen appears. This is more revealing than the in-Studio checks, since it captures the real runtime session.

3. What to look for

Because it affects multiple apps over different lists, multiple users, and different devices, the common thread is more likely a shared dependency than any one list. In Monitor, watch for failing connector calls (timeouts, throttling/429s, auth/token expiry on long sessions) - these often show up as the screen appears after the app has run for a while.

References (Microsoft Learn)

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Raghav Mishra - LinkedIn | PowerAI Labs