Internal service error during Power BI Service refresh – recurring issue

This is a known, intermittent Power BI Service issue, and the message is accurate: it’s usually transient. Common causes are:

• Service-side throttling or capacity pressure (shared capacity is most affected)

• Backend refresh infrastructure hiccups (nothing wrong with your model)

• Gateway handshake timing out (even if the gateway is healthy)

• Heavy refresh operations (large models, many partitions, long M steps)

Because nothing changed in your dataset/config, this strongly points to service instability, not a modeling error.

The best you could do is to create a pipeline to refresh the semantic models you have and add a retry setting on it.