The solution was found at this post https://forum.tagdiv.com/topic/how-to-get-rid-of-black-bar-that-appeared-after-the-update/

While the plugin appeared to be causing the problem, it turned out that the PHP deployment didn’t go well, and the conflict was with the “snuffleupagus module” which was returning a cUrl error trying to verify the SSL.

I am actually not quite sure what the solution was because after four days of waiting for Bluehost escalated support to do anything I decided it would be better to migrate the site to Kinsta which went smoothly. Shout out to the team at Kinsta for taking care of me. 🙂

I am now Newspaper on PHP 8 and everything looks and feels great on the site.

Cheers to TagDiv! My favorite development team! 🙂

• This reply was modified 2 years by JCouso.

Hi there Anamaria! This problem affected my admin dashboard (among other things) and I have no way to log in and see which version of Newspaper I am running, but I had just updated to the latest version about a week ago I believe. And before I made the changes to the PHP Monday I made sure all plugins and the theme were up to date. Unfortunately, at the moment that is as far as I can troubleshoot, but as soon as Bluehost figures out what is going on I will update this thread with the version number. Thank you for the response, I appreciate it.

Also, I am running PHP version 7.4.33.