Office 365 – SharePoint Online – Issue with OOB News webpart and solution

Hi All,

Today new issue and solution 🙂 Its very interesting issue, have a look once completely.

Recently in one of our O365 Intranet application we faced an issue with OOB News WP. Its small issue but it took our time so thought to sharing 🙂

Background: We have O365 – SharePoint Online Intranet application and one of the site front page our customer has added OOB news web part as

We have Hub site and respective sites are associated to the Hub site. We have Hub site navigation is in place.

Issue: Here, issue is whenever we are redirecting the site where this OOB News WP is added, first time this web part showing no data, blank WP without any content. It was looking like same as in figure 1. To see the data, we have to refresh the page once.

Since this issue is affecting to every user it became critical issue.

Also this is OOB WP we don’t have many options to explore. We don’t have control over it. We did bit googling but no luck 🙁

Then we just try to find some workaround and we verified the settings and those are looks like as

News source is selected as “This site” as shown in figure 2. Then we verified the “Network” tab from the browser and we realized that, when we redirect from the other site to this site, URL for this WP is

<RootSiteURL>/Sites/<None> – This means here News WP is not getting the “This site” URL. Interesting no :).

Actually it should be our current site URL. And this is the reason WP didn’t load the content. When we refresh the page once again WP loads the content properly.

Workaround / Solution: This seems to be OOB issue. So just as workaround we changed the source from “This site” to “Select sites” and selected value as current site as

Figure 3:Office 365-SharePoint Online – OOB News WP – Changed the Settings

As in above figure, we have selected the current site from the sites associated in Hub site. And OOB News WP working like a charm 😊

Thanks for reading 🙂

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