'Loading failed. Please refresh in few moments' Browsing Powershell gallery

Hello alex8bitw,

Greetings! Thanks for raising this question in the Q&A forum.

Don't worry you haven't done anything wrong and this is not a problem with your Automation account or subscription. Let me explain exactly what's going on and how you can work around it right now.

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.

The PowerShell Gallery team has explicitly confirmed that the issue is ongoing, it is related to search indexing (Lucene) instability, and architectural improvements are in progress but no timeline has been shared.

This is why it sometimes shows one package but fails on others — the search index is partially degraded, not completely down.

Here's how to work around it right now, step by step:

1. Go directly to the PowerShell Gallery website to find the packages you need. Visit https://www.powershellgallery.com and search for your required modules there the website itself is up, only the search API integration with Azure Automation is affected.

Download the module(s) you need from the PowerShell Gallery website directly to your local machine. On the module's page, click "Manual Download" to get the .nupkg file.

Rename the downloaded file from .nupkg to .zip. For example, rename Az.Accounts.3.0.0.nupkg to Az.Accounts.3.0.0.zip.

Import the module manually into your Azure Automation account via the Azure Portal:

• Navigate to your Automation Account in the Azure Portal.
  • Under Shared Resources, click Modules.
    • Click "+ Add a module".
      • Choose "Upload a module file" and select the .zip file you renamed in Step 3.
        • Select the correct Runtime Version (PowerShell 5.1 or 7.2) and click Import.

1. For Runtime Environments specifically (which is what you're working with), the steps are slightly different:

• Go to your Automation Account → Runtime Environments.
• Open the Runtime Environment you want to add packages to.
• Click "+ Add packages" and choose "Upload from local file" instead of browsing the gallery.
  • Upload the .zip file directly this bypasses the gallery search entirely and works reliably.

1. Check the official PowerShell Gallery status page to monitor when the search service is restored: 👉 https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShellGallery/blob/master/psgallery_status.md 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 or Service Health. So don't be surprised if Azure Service Health shows no incidents this is expected.

As a helpful tip if you need to add many packages at once, it's faster to use the PowerShell Gallery website to find all the package versions you need first, download them all, and then do a batch import into your Runtime Environment rather than importing one at a time through the portal.

If this answer helps you kindly accept the answer which will help others who have similar questions.

Best Regards,

Jerald Felix.