SharePoint 2013: Something went wrong. To try again, reload the page and then start the workflow

Problem

When users try to manually start a 2013 workflow on a list item, they experience the following error message:

They experience this error message when attempting to start any 2013 workflow.  They do not experience this error message when starting 2010 workflows.

Solution

• Verify that all 2013 workflow services have been started.

References

• None

Notes

• When I experienced this error message, I first checked if a simple 2013 workflow would run. When that also failed, I suspected that it was 2013 workflow infrastructure related.  For this farm, all workflow services (aside from the usual client services) ran on a single application server.  To begin troubleshooting, I first checked the status of all 2013 workflow services on the application server.  I then discovered that the Service Bus Message Broker service was stopped.  After starting this service again, and I reloaded the page, and I was able to start 2013 workflows again without issue.  No need to re-publish the workflow.