Modern team site creation almost never completes

[Bernd Rickenberg]

I am creating O365 groups using the PnP Unified Groups Utility (from PnP Core component) with app-only permissions. This has been working fine on various tenants until recently.

Now, the modern team sites are created and can be accessed via UI, BUT the site collection status remains 'Creating' for a long time (e.g. 75 minutes). I check the site status with this PowerShell script:

Get-PnPTenantSite -Url [someurl] | FT Status

Another noticable effect is that certain programmatic changes to the SharePoint site lead to this error:

Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerException: Cannot set properties on site [someurl] because the site is not currently available.
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRequest.ProcessResponseStream(Stream responseStream)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRequest.ProcessResponse()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRequest.ExecuteQueryToServer(ChunkStringBuilder sb)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRequest.ExecuteQuery()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRuntimeContext.ExecuteQuery()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientContext.ExecuteQuery()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientContextExtensions.ExecuteQueryImplementation(ClientRuntimeContext clientContext, Int32 retryCount, Int32 delay)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.TenantExtensions.SetSiteProperties(Tenant tenant, String siteFullUrl, String title, Nullable`1 allowSelfServiceUpgrade, Nullable`1 sharingCapability, Nullable`1 storageMaximumLevel, Nullable`1 storageWarningLevel, Nullable`1 userCodeMaximumLevel, Nullable`1 userCodeWarningLevel, Nullable`1 noScriptSite, Boolean wait, Func`2 timeoutFunction)

Does anyone have the same issue? Are there any known work-arounds?

I have noticed this behaviour so far on one production (EMEA) and one MS demo tenant (US).

When the the site eventually changes to Status = Active, everything works as expected.

UPDATE 2017-09-01

I have now heard that a lot of folks are facing the excat same issue. There appears to be a few more related issue/facets with the O365 group creation, too. I have collected 'my issues' in a similar post on stackexchange here: https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/224099/creating-modern-team-site-takes-long-time-to-c.... It would be great to get a bit of background on what is going on here and some guidance on how to work-around or avoid these issues.

[#2]

Adding here @Vesa Juvonen

[#3]

I created one using app tokens today in a dev tenant, site was instant Active, to my surprise :)

[#4]

I am seeing this 'issue' in quite a few of my sites. Typically in that case the site is not ready at all. Programmatic changes fail with the usual exceptions until the site really is active.

A couple of weeks ago I used polling on the site status and it turned out to take 2 to 5 minutes for a site to become active which seems fair compared classic site collections :-).