Unattended UiPath Robot VM showing black screen and user session timeout

We have an unattended UiPath robot running on a Windows VM as per schedule. On one occasion, the VM showed a black screen with only File Explorer visible when logging in. Orchestrator showed no job running at that time. UiPath logs show “Creating user session timed out / Could not start executor,” and Windows logs show explorer.exe crashing. A network outage was reported around the same time. Please advise on root cause and prevention.

Hi @PAVAN_KALYAN1

Refer below KB by UiPath on this issue.

Hope this helps.

Regards

Sonali

this probably is related to your infra.
since its a VM, there are high chances that this is due to latency.
Talk to your IT infra about it because this is something which UiPath cannot handle.
SG.

Hi @PAVAN_KALYAN1

The error happened because windows could not create a full user session after the network outage, which caused explorer.exe to crash. when the session is broken, the unattended robot cannot start and shows “creating user session timed out / could not start executor.”

prevention: keep network/domain connectivity stable, auto‑restart the robot service or vm after outages, and ensure the windows user profile loads correctly.

Pls check-

OR

Happy Automation