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Power Apps Studio - Why the sad face?

What's the reason for the sad face icon that can appear in the Power Apps designer and what can we do about it?

A user recently reported an issue where Power Apps was crashing with a sad face icon. If you've not seen this before, the screenshot below shows what appears.

What's the cause of the sad face icon?

The sad face icon is something that the Chrome browser displays when it encounters an error condition. It is not something that is generated or controlled by Power Apps, and the typical cause of this problem has nothing to do with formulas or the way in which we use Power Apps.

The cause of the error in the screenshot above was intermittent network connectivity.

How to prevent the sad face icon from appearing

The most common causes of this behaviour are low available memory or browser extensions that misbehave. Therefore, the following steps can help minimise this behaviour.

  • If you have lots of open tabs open in your browser, close unused tabs to reduce the memory footprint of the browser
  • Disable unwanted browser extensions
  • Clear browser cookies and the browser cache
  • Try a different browser
In general, I would say that this problem occurs infrequently but hopefully, the steps above will help if the problem seems to persistent.
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