In the Windows operating system, the blue screen of death (BSOD) is an error message that appears when Windows reaches a fatal system error. The system cannot continue and your only choice is to reboot.
Salesforce has its own BSOD, and it’s called GACK. According to https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/tag/gack, “A gack is what happens when an error got thrown within our application and we didn’t catch it and handle it.”
A GACK is different since it doesn’t actually crash the system and it’s reproducible. So if you did something to create a GACK, doing the same thing again causes the same GACK.
I’ve encountered this error when editing and debugging flows. Everything works well until you make a change and click “Debug”. Instead of the flow navigating through the elements and displaying an error in the element at fault, Salesforce doesn’t seem to execute the flow at all and simply displays this error:
“Unfortunately, there was a problem. Please try again. If the problem continues, get in touch with your administrator with the error ID shown here and any other related details.”
Troubleshooting this can be annoying, but here’s what’s recommended:
- Return to a previous version of the flow
- Step by step, recreate the current version of the flow with the error
- Click Debug for each step, to confirm it works
- Eventually you’ll hit a step that fails, and the last change caused the error
Ya, that’s annoying.
To give you an example, my most recent flow GACK occurred when I moved an element from one decision outcome to another. The element had a formula variable, which referenced a Get operation only found in the previous decision outcome. The formula field didn’t know what to do and GACKed.
The takeaway
Now you know what is a GACK and what to do when you see one.