Figma crashing, canvas turns black

  1. I am experiencing problems with both browser version and Figma app since this morning (Russia) and about 5 hours in total. Glitching of main canvas\layout, presentation preview, hangs, graphical glitches, unresponsiveness. Everything was fine yesterday. On my side everything’s up to date, including chrome and drivers.


  2. Is there some maintenance in works right now?

Sometimes it’s loading fine, then it can be triggered either by just holding ctrl and zooming or after switching from presentation tab to project page tab by ctrl+1\2 then it goes black and stuck until I go back in files and hit F5 there. Then same story.

Desktop_2021_09_02_16_05_45_746_cr

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+1

Yup I am having the entire day with this new update of talking in figma.
All the files that were working fine, now just stay black or white, and if it loads, it just goes to black again.
Glad I am not alone, has i tried to reinstall go to the browser ( firefox, or chrome the same )
No success

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Same Probleme here. Several team members have lots of problem now. are you working on it figma?

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Since yesterday (02/09/2021), Figma files constantly crash (turn black).
This didn’t happen before at all with files that are not heavy but since the installation of new tool (start conversation in Figma) it is happening constantly.
This makes working in Figma really unmanageable.
Is there any solution to this?

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Update: 04.09.21 The issue still persists.

I want to ask you guys on what plan are you on? paid or free?

In addition: Win10Pro 21h1 19043.1165, Nvidia dr. 471.96

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Ok, idk for how long it’ll work but I did stumbled on a possible fix with chrome://flags/
Choose ANGLE graphics backend I tried setting it to d3d11 but it was the same black screen bugs for me, but not on OpenGL! everything’s seems to be normal again

I have a paid access

Same here.

I opened a highly intensive graphic card (hi-fi wireframe of a webshop) on Figma webapp and it loaded ok at first. Then a few seconds after it crashed. I looked around online and it seems to be related to graphical auto-switch in laptops with 2 GPUs. I have one integrated in Intel Core i7 and another dedicated NVIDIA GeForce MX450. I have 16GB RAM and Windows 10. When I checked the work load in Task Manager, it seems that the crash happened a few seconds after the memory usage hits 95 - 98%. Then the screen went black, and my memore usage went down to 20 - 30%.

Maybe this is when the GPU auto-switch kicks in? I tried disabling the auto-switch and only use NVIDIA as suggested in another forum but it didn’t really work.

I thought of installing the app locally but is it helping?

Thanks in advance!

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I got 6700k, gtx1080, 16gb ram and 16gb of virtual memory on the page file.

I stumbled on fix here on the forum, but the topic was about canvas distortion glitch but it worked for me with this black screen issue.

The fix: Go to chrome://flags/ and write in the search - Choose ANGLE graphics backend (In that topic i’ve found this guy said to set it to d3d11, but in my experience it didn’t work, as if it was already set to it) in my case - setting it to OpenGL did fixed the issue!

Idk what they changed in the latest chrome update or Figma, but I haven’t been able to work on my project since 02.09 until 04.09. Anyway, I haven’t been struggled with such problem before, it was always like open up chrome and work. I hope it won’t happen again and I hope the fix will also help you guys.

As of how to fix it on the Figma App here’s the screen i took but I haven’t tried it:

And thats my taskmgr screen as I’ve heard of that ram overflow issue but idk maybe bcoz of my page file I don’t have problems with it:

4 Likes

Same problem. It is very irritating to work, in every 2-3mins my screen goes black and reloads and then figma stops working for few seconds.

Hi Serj, thanks for that tip. I tried it on my Edge, set it to OpenGL. But for me that did not really work. I installed the desktop app and there I still have black outs, although the file would load after each black out. This happens especially when I’m scrolling to the boards with many graphical elements (e.g. images, colors, etc.).

THANKS! This helped :smiley:

Hi guys!
Same here!

Until yesterday the desktop app worked perfectly for me. However, since early morning I am trying to work on one of my large files and after about 5 or 10 minutes the screen goes black/white and the file crashes.

In addition to this, the changes are not being saved and the RAM is overloaded.

:pensive:

It’s the same for me, using Edge and it sucks!
Keeps crashing, i even tried to clear catche data and i even closed my edge and tried to work on chrome but it’s the same, just keeps crashing.
Since this new feature the conversation thing update, the board keeps crashing!

It’s the same for me, using Edge
Keeps crashing, i even tried to clear catche data and i even closed my edge and tried to work on chrome but it’s the same, just keeps crashing on all browsers. Obviously it’s not our PCs nor browser issue. It’s a Figma issue! and it’s been going on for a god damn week or more now and not yet fixed
Since this new feature the conversation thing update, the board keeps crashing!

Hi @Regina_Villanueva , did you try setting your browser to OpenGL, too? Did you have the problem only on browser or also in the app?

Have more people tried the OpenGL tip from Serj?

Also, please vote this thread so hopefully we can get someone from Figma to notice. Or if anyone has found any other widely discussed thread about the same issue, please share here so we all can join there.

Thanks!

Strange issue really. If the d3d/opegl change doesn’t help then maybe its related to ram/page file? But hey, my page file was already set to 16gigs when canvas started to blackout. I hope Figma staff will look into it.

Apparently it’s known that Figma sucks in all RAM capacity and then crashes after the limit is reached.

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