It could be that Laravel is not detecting your application environment.

you can check what environment it is using with

command line: php artisan env

or in code: dd(App::environment());

Then check if that environment is defined in the bootstrap/start.php file

Hope that helps.

Hmm that could be it, strange that it works fine most of the time. I have configured debug bar to display environment so the next time it occurs it should display it to me. Thanks for the tip.

Now it happened again, unfortunately the problem is not in the environment detection. I've looked at debugbar and it displayed local like it should, again reloading fixed the problem but I don't want my users to encounter random errors.