FabCon is coming to Atlanta

Join us at FabCon Atlanta from March 16 - 20, 2026, for the ultimate Fabric, Power BI, AI and SQL community-led event. Save $200 with code FABCOMM.

@Anonymous,

An HTTP 503 means 'Service Unavailable'. It's possible that NPM was experiencing outages when you were attempting to download powerbi-visuals-tools .

If you have a continued unavailability and you can access npmjs.com in your browser, it's possible that there are some network/proxy issues local to you. For instance, my work network is quite restrictive and I had to get npmjs.org whitelisted so that I could download packages. If you have a network admin, it might be worth seeking their assistance to see if there's anything being blocked your end.

Hopefully this might give you a few ideas.

Good luck!

Daniel

Hmmm... if it's definitely not a proxy issue then it might be worth looking at the registry. I see from your post that it's trying to resolve via HTTP and NPM has been using HTTPS for a while now. Of note, I tried to replicate this using the registry your output reports above and I couldn't get it to fail, but you should probably update the setting anyway and see if it helps.

Run:

npm config set registry https://registry.npmjs.org

Confirm it has been changed to HTTPS by running:

npm config get registry

It should be the same as set above in the first step.

Try re-running your command again. If it errors, then you might want to confirm that trying to install other modules (e.g. d3) has the same result. If so, this suggests that it's something very specific to NPM rather than the Custom Visuals SDK, and you'll get much better support over at https://npm.community/ .

I hope some of this might help you out,

Daniel

Power BI Monthly Update - September 2025

Check out the September 2025 Power BI update to learn about new features.

Fabric Community Update - August 2025

Find out what's new and trending in the Fabric community.