Azure Automation: „Browse Gallery“ fails to load / PowerShell Gallery search integration down

Question

When attempting to import modules in Azure Automation via "Browse Gallery", the interface fails to load any results and displays the error message: "Loading failed. Please refresh in few moments."

While this initially appeared to be a portal-specific issue, navigating directly to the PowerShell Gallery website reveals an official warning: "The PowerShell Gallery is currently experiencing intermittent issues with search. Please see https://aka.ms/PSGalleryStatus for more details."

Current Status:

Azure Portal: The "Browse Gallery" search bar is unresponsive and returns a loading failure.

PowerShell Gallery: The site explicitly confirms ongoing intermittent search issues.

Impact: Users are currently unable to discover or import modules directly through the Azure Automation UI, hindering automated deployments and maintenance.

Questions:

1. Is there an estimated time for the restoration of the search API between Azure Automation and the PowerShell Gallery?

Answer 1

Hello Christiana Hug

This issue is not caused by Azure Automation or the Azure portal. It is due to an upstream service issue with the PowerShell Gallery search infrastructure, which Azure Automation’s “Browse Gallery” feature depends on.

Microsoft has officially acknowledged that the PowerShell Gallery is currently experiencing intermittent search failures, which directly impacts any service (including Azure Automation) that relies on its search API.

Microsoft has not published any estimated time for resolution (ETA) for restoring full PowerShell Gallery search functionality.

The PowerShell Gallery team has explicitly stated that:

• The issue is ongoing
• It is related to search indexing (Lucene) instability
• Architectural improvements are in progress, but no timeline has been shared

This is confirmed in the official PowerShell Gallery status page maintained by Microsoft.

Reference: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShellGallery/blob/master/psgallery_status.md?plain=1

While the search service is degraded, Microsoft supports manual module import methods, which continue to work reliably.

Supported alternatives:

1. Download the required module directly from the PowerShell Gallery website.
2. Import the module into Azure Automation manually (Upload from local file).

Reference: https://docs.azure.cn/en-us/automation/automation-runbook-gallery - This documentation confirms that manual imports are fully supported and are the recommended approach when gallery browsing is unavailable.

This issue is specific to PowerShell Gallery search and is not classified as a global Azure service outage, which is why it does not appear on Azure Status / Service Health.

Thanks,

Suchitra.