r HTML visual widget - Plotly elements have suddenly stopped working across multiple visuals

[Bergam0t]

I have created several custom r HTML visuals that use the Plotly library to output an html file, as per this tutorial from Microsoft: Build a funnel plot from R script to R visual - Power BI | Microsoft Learn 

At 4pm GMT 2023-06-20, all of these visuals were working fine in PowerBI Desktop (July 2022 and May 2023 versions across two machines), as well as in multiple reports published to the PowerBI service. 

However, at 9am GMT today (2023-06-21), all r HTML plotly visuals just display a blank output on all of the platforms mentioned above. 

Within one of the visuals, I have created an option to instead display the output as a HTML datatable using the R DT library. This output still displays correctly, so all of the underlying R calculations seem to be working, as well as the ability to output an HTML visual - just not one that is using Plotly. 

Is anyone else experiencing this, or is anyone aware of any changes that may have suddenly caused this to occur?

The visuals have been created using pbiviz v4.0.5 due to known issues with later versions of the rhtml template. 

Re: Issue with R plotly in pbiviz versions 4.0.6+ - Microsoft Fabric Community

[Bergam0t]

And just as suddenly, they've all started working again. No change to anything and didn't even have to close Power BI desktop to get them working again on there - just switch report pages to force a refresh. The same thing had not worked all morning. 

I'm glad they're back, but I'd be interested to hear any theories people have on why this happened as I'm still stumped and would like to be able to give a summary of what happened to the users of our reports.

My only theory at the moment is something to do with plotly loading a file from the web and this temporarily being blocked (or plotly itself being down for some time so said theoretical file couldn't be accessed, though I couldn't see any evidence of this when I looked at their status page and generating plotly graphs using R outside of Power BI seemed to work fine).