WHM displays [A fatal error or timeout occurred while processing this directive.]

Symptoms

When either logging in or accessing a page as root in WHM, you are presented with the following error:

[A fatal error or timeout occurred while processing this directive.]

Also, the following will appear in the cPanel error logs:

[XXXX-01-01 00:00:00 +0000] die [Internal Death while parsing [stdin] 10000] (XID qwcywz) The system failed to parse the JSON stream data “” for the caller “(eval)” because of an error: malformed JSON string, neither tag, array, object, number, string or atom, at character offset 0 (before "(end of string)") at /usr/local/cpanel/Cpanel/JSON.pm line 123.

Description 

This error occurs when cPanel attempts to verify the license and a required license file at the following path is missing or empty:

/var/cpanel/licenseid_credentials.json

Workaround

Access your server through SSH as root and run the license verification utility:

/usr/local/cpanel/cpkeyclt