PowerBI January 2026 Update - On-Premise Reporting Server

[MTerkait]

I have noticed a bug with RLS Pbix files, where the normal behavior in our May 2025 environment was giving greyed out visual and not showing the data, after upgrading to January 2026 on test environmnet. the behavior has changed and it automatically refreshes indefinitely until an RLS is set. the page keeps reloading with error 401 unauthorized.

[v-hjannapu]

Hi @MTerkait,
Thank you  for reaching out to the Microsoft fabric community forum.

This issue is happening because RLS is enabled in the report, but the user opening the report is not added to any RLS role.

In earlier versions like your May 2025 environment, when a user was not part of any RLS role, Power BI used to show the visuals as greyed out with a “restricted data” message. The report stayed on the page and did not refresh again and again.

After the January 2026 update, the behavior has changed. Now, if a user opens a report without being assigned to an RLS role, Power BI fails the security check and returns 401 Unauthorized. Because of this, the report keeps reloading continuously instead of showing restricted visuals. Make sure every user who opens the report is assigned to an RLS role, or Create a default role even if it returns no data and assign users to that role.

Once the user is mapped to an RLS role, the report should load normally and the refresh loop should stop.

Please try this and let us know if the issue still happens.

Hope the above provided information help you resolve the issue, if you have any further concerns or queries, please feel free to reach out to us.
Regards,
Community Support Team.

[MTerkait]

Appreciate your reply on this, but I don't understand the point where the RS is forcing reload on the client. what is this change in behavior trying to achieve?

seems more like a bug to me.

[v-hjannapu · Accepted solution]

Hi @MTerkait,

The reload is not something Power BI is trying to do on purpose for the user. In the newer build, Power BI is checking RLS more strictly when the report loads. If RLS exists and the user is not part of any role, the security check fails and Power BI returns a 401 unauthorized response. Because the dataset load fails at that point, the report viewer retries loading the report, which is why you see the page refreshing continuously. Earlier versions handled this more gracefully by keeping the page loaded and showing restricted visuals, but now the failure happens earlier during the load process. There is no additional benefit or new functionality intended from this behavior. As per current Power BI guidance, when RLS is defined, all users must be assigned to at least one role, and doing that avoids the reload issue.

Regards,
Community Support Team.

[v-hjannapu]

Hi @MTerkait,
I hope the information provided above assists you in resolving the issue. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us. We are here to support you and will be happy to help with any further assistance you may need.

Regards,
Community Support Team.

[v-hjannapu]

Hi @MTerkait,
I hope the above details help you fix the issue. If you still have any questions or need more help, feel free to reach out. We are always here to support you.


Regards,
Community Support Team.