"Executions" Tab won't load (401 Unauthorized), but the rest of the UI works

[Pavel_Shein]

Hi everyone,

I’m facing an issue where the “Executions” tab in my n8n UI won’t load. It either remains empty or shows an infinite loading spinner. All other parts of the UI (Workflows, Credentials, etc.) work perfectly.

When I opened my browser’s developer tools, I saw that the UI is making a request to /api/v1/executions and it fails with a 401 Unauthorized error.

This led me to investigate the authentication, and I found a very strange paradox:

• Any API request using the X-N8N-API-KEY header fails with a 401 error.

• However, if I log in via the UI and use the resulting session cookie, all API calls work perfectly.

I have spent a significant amount of time trying to fix this 401 error, but nothing has worked.

Here is what I’ve already done to fix the 401 error:

• Nginx configuration has been fully corrected (underscores_in_headers on; was added to nginx.conf and proxy_set_header for the API key was added to the site config).

• It’s not a permissions issue (verified by creating a brand new admin user; their API key also fails).

• Network issues have been ruled out (no Google Cloud Load Balancer is in use, and the 401 error persists even on direct requests to localhost:5678).

• The entire server has been fully rebooted.

My main question is: Could the issue with the “Executions” tab be caused by something else entirely, where the 401 API key failure is just a symptom? Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong place, and there’s another known issue that presents this way?

My Environment:

• n8n: 1.105.4 on Docker

• Host: Google Cloud VM

• Reverse Proxy: Nginx

I would be very grateful for a fresh perspective on this problem!