JSM Customer Portal completely down - Encountering "null - null" error

Question

Our Jira Service Management Customer Portal has suddenly stopped working for all users. When navigating to any portal link (including the root Help Center /servicedesk/customer/portals and specific portal URLs like /servicedesk/customer/portal/2), the page fails to load.

The browser displays a blank page with:

(null)

Encountered a "null - null" error while loading this page.

Go to Jira home

Internal agents can still create tickets via the backend (+ Create button), but end users cannot access any customer-facing portals. We have not altered project permission schemes recently.

What typically triggers this frontend "null - null" error on the customer portal, and how can we restore access?

Thanks for any guidance!

Tomislav Tobijas · Answer

@censtatdscb - just to confirm, we're here talking about on-prem (DC) version of Jira/JSM and not cloud, right? 👀

I'm asking as this specific UI message (and formatting) is what I've seen in DC and never on cloud.

Cheers,

Tobi

Josh · Answer

Building on Matthew's checklist, the detail in your post narrows this down. The root /servicedesk/customer/portals page failing as well as every individual portal means it isn't one project's request type or permission scheme, since those would only break the projects they belong to. Agents working while the portal is down points the same way: the Jira backend is fine, the customer-facing frontend is what's broken.

So I'd skip the project-level checks and go straight to two things. First, status.atlassian.com, in case other sites are seeing the same thing right now. Second, a support ticket with the Trace ID you already have, since that ID is what lets them trace the failed render on their side.

One quick check worth doing first: open the portal in a private window and as a second user. If it fails for everyone including signed-out visitors, that confirms it's site-wide and you can say so in the ticket.

Matthew Sinclair · Answer

Run this checklist of sorts as a sanity check -

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/set-up-and-manage-portal-access/

Generally however that kind of error means something is malfunctioning - may need to contact Atlassian support or check status pages.

Give it 30 minutes or so before you do - it may be a blip.

https://support.atlassian.com/contact#/