How to Stop Refresh in Power BI Service

A Power BI refresh getting stuck or running at the wrong time is a common headache that can disrupt your reports and dashboards. Instead of just waiting and hoping for the best, you can take control by stopping it directly in the Power BI Service. This guide will walk you through exactly how to cancel a refresh that's in progress and how to permanently disable scheduled refreshes you no longer need.

Why Would You Need to Stop a Power BI Refresh?

Before jumping into the "how," let's quickly cover the "why." Several scenarios might send you scrambling to hit the cancel button. Understanding these situations can help you troubleshoot issues faster in the future.

• The Refresh is Stuck: This is the most common reason. The refresh status shows "In progress" for hours with no end in sight, often due to a data source issue, gateway being offline, or a runaway query.
• Incorrect Data was Updated: You might realize that the underlying data source (like a spreadsheet or database) contains errors right after a refresh was started. Stopping it prevents that bad data from populating your reports.
• Performance Issues: A large or complex refresh can strain your data source or Power BI capacity, slowing everything down. You may need to stop it and reschedule for a time with lower traffic.
• Scheduled at the Wrong Time: Maybe a daily refresh for a U.S. audience is accidentally scheduled to run during their peak business hours. Stopping it and rescheduling for an off-peak time is the best path forward.
• Dataset Maintenance: You need to make structural changes to your model, add new tables, or edit relationships. Stopping any active refreshes ensures the dataset isn't locked while you work.

First, Check Your Refresh Status

You can't stop a refresh if you don't know it's running. The first step is always to check the refresh history for your dataset. This dashboard gives you a complete log of all successful, failed, and in-progress data refreshes.

Here’s how to find it:

1. Navigate to the correct workspace in the Power BI Service.
2. From the list of assets, find the Dataset you're looking for. Make sure you're looking at the dataset, not the report with the same name.
3. Hover over the dataset and click the three-dot menu (...) for "More options."
4. From the dropdown menu, select Settings.
5. On the Settings page, click on the Refresh history tab.

Here, you'll see a list of every refresh attempt with details like Type (Scheduled, On-demand), Start and End times, and Status (Completed, Failed, In progress). If you see a refresh with the status "In progress," you can move on to the next step to cancel it.

How to Manually Cancel a Refresh in Progress

Okay, you've confirmed in your refresh history that a dataset refresh is stuck spinning. Stopping it is thankfully straightforward, as long as you have the right permissions to the workspace (typically roles like Member, Contributor, or Admin).

Here’s the step-by-step process:

1. Go to Refresh History: Follow the exact same steps as the previous section to get to the "Refresh history" pane for your dataset.
2. Locate the Active Refresh: Look for the entry with the "In progress" status. There will only ever be one for a given dataset at a time.
3. Cancel the Refresh: At the far right of that "In progress" row, you will see a small, circular icon with an "x" inside it. This is the Cancel refresh button.
4. Click the "Cancel" Button: Click the icon. Power BI will then ask you to confirm that you want to cancel the refresh. Click "Yes."

The status for that entry will immediately change to "Cancelled." The refresh process will halt, and your dataset and any connected reports will revert to the data from the last successful refresh. It's a clean and immediate way to solve a stuck refresh.

How to Disable a Scheduled Refresh to Prevent Future Refreshes

What if you don't need to stop a single refresh but want to prevent all future refreshes from happening? This is common for old projects, archived reports, or datasets you’ve decided to update manually. Instead of canceling it every day, you can just turn the schedule off completely.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Navigate to Dataset Settings: Similar to before, find the dataset you want to modify within its Power BI workspace.
2. Hover over the dataset, click the three-dot menu (...) and select Settings.
3. Find the Scheduled Refresh Section: On the Settings page, look for a section called "Scheduled refresh." It may be collapsed, so you might need to click the arrow to expand it.
4. Toggle the Schedule Off: Inside this section, you will see a main master toggle at the top with a label like "Keep your data up to date." If it's blue, the schedule is on. Simply click this toggle to turn it off. It will turn grey.
5. Save Your Changes: At the bottom of the section, click the Apply button. This saves your change, and Power BI will no longer trigger automatic refreshes based on the schedule you had set up.

Keep in mind, this action does not stop a refresh that is already in progress. It only prevents future scheduled refreshes from starting. If one is already running, you'll still need to cancel it manually using the method in the section above.

Things to Check if the Refresh Keeps Failing or Getting Stuck

Sometimes, stopping a refresh is just a temporary fix. If you find yourself repeatedly needing to cancel the refresh for the same dataset, it’s a sign of a deeper issue that needs attention.

1. Data Gateway Health

If you are pulling data from on-premises sources (like a local SQL Server or files on a shared drive), your data gateway is the bridge to the Power BI Service. If the gateway is offline, out of date, or an account on the gateway computer doesn't have permissions to the source file, your refresh will fail. Check that the computer running the gateway is on and connected to the internet, and that the gateway software shows an "online" status from within Power BI Service.

2. Data Source Credentials

This is a particularly common culprit. Database passwords expire, access tokens need to be re-authenticated, or permissions to a file folder change. In Power BI’s dataset settings, find the "Data source credentials" section and click "Edit credentials." Sign in again to re-authenticate the connection and ensure Power BI has the access it needs.

3. Inefficient Power Query Transformations

A very complex or poorly optimized set of transformations in Power Query can cause the refresh to time out. Operations that are particularly slow include table merges on large datasets with non-optimized keys, or complex text manipulations applied row-by-row. Go back to your PBIX file in Power BI Desktop, open the Power Query Editor, and see if you can make your queries more efficient or offload some of the transformation work back to the source system (e.g., in a SQL view).

Final Thoughts

Knowing how to stop a data refresh gives you essential control over your Power BI service environment. Whether you're troubleshooting a stuck process or simply pausing automatic updates for maintenance, the ability to cancel an active refresh or disable a schedule is a fundamental skill for managing your BI assets.

As you scale, managing dozens of scheduled refreshes, data gateways, and credentials can feel like a full-time job. We built Graphed because we believe getting real-time insights shouldn't involve so much manual overhead. We connect directly to your marketing and sales data sources - like Google Analytics, Salesforce, or Shopify - and create live, interactive dashboards that are always up-to-date automatically, letting you spend more time on analysis and less time on maintenance.