Low severityauthentication
Power BI Error:
AADSTS50033
What does this error mean?
Transient Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) sign-in failure unrelated to the directory database — usually resolves on retry.
Common causes
- 1Temporary unavailability of an Entra ID sign-in backend node during the auth request
- 2Throttling or load-balancing event on the STS (Security Token Service) endpoint
- 3Brief network/connectivity blip between the client (Power BI gateway, ADF linked service, Fabric capacity) and login.microsoftonline.com
- 4Ongoing Entra ID / Microsoft 365 service incident affecting authentication
- 5Token acquisition retried too aggressively without exponential backoff, amplifying transient failures
How to fix it
- 1Retry the sign-in or refresh operation after 30–60 seconds — AADSTS50033 is explicitly flagged as retryable by Microsoft and most occurrences self-resolve.
- 2Check the Microsoft 365 Service Health dashboard (admin.microsoft.com → Health → Service health) and the Azure status page for an active Entra ID / Authentication incident.
- 3If the error occurs in a Power BI scheduled refresh, ADF pipeline, or Fabric notebook, ensure your auth client (MSAL/ADAL) implements exponential backoff with jitter on 5xx/AADSTS5xxxx responses instead of immediate retry.
- 4For on-premises data gateway scenarios, verify outbound connectivity to *.login.microsoftonline.com and *.msftauth.net is stable and not intermittently blocked by a proxy or firewall.
- 5If failures persist beyond 15 minutes with no reported incident, open a support ticket with Microsoft including the correlation ID and timestamp from the sign-in log in Entra ID → Sign-in logs.