"Service worker is not responding" error and all messaging is broken

[Giovanni Campagna]

Hello all,

We have found an issue with one of our users where the extension becomes completely unresponsive.

The service worker seems to start correctly, but content scripts and extension pages are unable to communicate with it.

On the content script side, the error is "Remote end does not exist". On the service worker side, there is no error in devtools, but in serviceworker-internals I found "Service Worker is not responding.", which appears to be a timeout in the internal communication to the sw process (https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:content/browser/service_worker/service_worker_version.cc;l=2619;drc=616d60fca655937c2b730db94fd32d37ddff3bb5?q=kNotRespondingErrorMesage). The service worker goes inactive immediately when that message appears, unless devtools is open. If devtools is open, the service worker continues but the extension is still broken because extension messaging is dead.

For the particular user who experienced this, other extensions were also affected around the same time: they all started and had meaningful logs in serviceworker-internals, but were not responsive to their toolbar icon.

Restarting Chrome did not help. Trying a different Chrome profile did not help.

Chrome 131 stable on arm64 macOS.

Has anyone seen this error before? It seems to be a Chrome bug, is it known and is there a workaround?

Thanks for the help,

Giovanni