Solving yet another "Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerException: Unknown Error"

This post was most recently updated on February 26th, 2023.

< 1 min read.

There are a thousand possible things that can throw a “Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerException”, but fewer things, that are ambiguous enough to be called “Unknown error”. This post describes one fairly usual fix for this issue!

But let’s get back to the beginning for a second – you get what and when now?

When running any code, that provisions new sites (much like https://www.koskila.net/new-pnpsite-fails-with-sitestatus3/), you get an error like this almost immediately:

Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerException: Unknown Error at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRequest.ProcessResponseStream(Stream responseStream) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRequest.ProcessResponse() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRequest.ExecuteQueryToServer(ChunkStringBuilder sb) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientContext.ExecuteQuery() at ...

What to do?

Solution to “Unknown error”

Okay – this sounds bold. Let’s find a silver-bullet solution to unknown errors, right?

You might be in luck, though – in my experience, most of the time you get this error while provisioning new sites, this is actually just yet another example of the URL being already reserved for a deleted site. And that’s usually easy to fix!

This one’s fairly straightforward to fix. You’ll just have to make sure to either use another URL for your new site or remove the existing (but deleted) site from the recycle bin.

I’ve written about the topic before, so I’ll just be citing myself. You can check this page below for instructions on how to fix this issue!

Remove-SPODeletedSite – Actually removing a SharePoint Online Site Collection

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Antti K. Koskela

Developer / Speaker / Consultant at Koskila / Precio Fishbone / Norppandalotti Software Co / Alter - Experience Ideas Ltd

Antti Koskela is a proud digital native nomadic millennial full stack developer (is that enough funny buzzwords? That's definitely enough funny buzzwords!), who works as Solutions Architect for Precio Fishbone, building delightful Digital Workplaces.

He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.

This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.

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