Error occurred while loading Web Application

This article explains how to handle issue when Web Application load is not working properly.

Problem

While trying to load a SharePoint farm the following error message was displayed:

Error occurred while loading ‘Application Name’ Web Application

and the following error messages are stored in the event log:

The following sites are not loaded properly because you do not have the right privileges for these databases. Unavailable databases: WSS_Content_7c8cd57018d5404bb5f6c8d4db8a7f8b WSS_Content_99d31b6221f849079028a2ce91ad6d47

Unavailable sites: http://intranet http://intranet/sites/HR http://intranet/sites/Sales

Solution

The user running the application needs to have proper privileges to access the information about Site Collections stored in the content databases. See this article for more details on configuring privileges.

If you are still having issues with individual Web Applications or other items you need to do the following: make sure the user has Shell access to the given content database, using the following PowerShell code to grant access:

 $spcdb = Get-SPContentDatabase WSS_Content_Intranet
 Add-SPShellAdmin -UserName DOMAIN\User -Database $spcdb