Suddenly, one day, several of the dashboards I had created in Data Studio crashed. They only showed a grey are with the not so encouraging information about a configuration error:

Normally I encounter this when the google account I use for creating the dashboard has been logged out for some reason. But this was not the case this time. So I followed the instructions…

Clicking on See Details the told me that the problem had something to do with the connection to the data. Alas, contacting the data source owner would not be of any help as the data source owner happens to be yours truly, and I was sure that I hadn’t made any changes to the data source.

At this point I was starting to become a little bit alarmed. What could have happened to the data source?

I decided to open the data source (from the pen-like icon next to the name of the data source):

This then in turn opened a slightly more informative, and certainly more encouraging, dialogue box:

Interestingly enough, I had not made any changes to the data source. The data source being Google Big Query and the owner of the data being this very same account since the beginning of this setup. I cannot really imagine what had caused this hickup in the connection, but it was indeed solved by “reconnecting” to the source. First clicking reconnect in the above dialogue box and then once again in the pane that opens:

After this you click “Finished”:

So in the end, all dashboards are now again up and running, although it was somewhat annoying having to go through all dashboards and “reconnect” to a data source I already am the owner of.