maintenance (503)¶

The service is closed for planned maintenance. Nothing was charged.

Cause¶

An operator has opened a maintenance window. While one is open, a gate in front of every route answers before the request reaches its endpoint. The answer is therefore the same at every address, including one that routes nowhere.

A window has two settings. In the stricter one every request is refused. In the lighter one reads are still served and anything that would change something is refused. A caller that only fetches results carries on working.

The message¶

The service is closed for maintenance; nothing was charged. Retry shortly.

The fix¶

Wait and retry. The response carries a Retry-After header with the number of seconds. Honor it rather than retrying on a tighter loop. A maintenance window does not clear on its own, and a fleet retrying every second arrives all at once when it does.

Planned windows are announced ahead of time on the status page.

event_id¶

event_id is always null on this code. It is a refusal the caller is meant to handle, so nothing is recorded as a failure to look at. The service answers and writes one log line.

Related codes¶

• service_unavailable — a dependency is unreachable.

The whole catalogue, grouped by what a caller does with it, is on errors.

The response¶

{
  "error": {
    "code": "maintenance",
    "message": "The service is closed for maintenance; nothing was charged. Retry shortly.",
    "docs_url": "https://doc.cheap/docs/errors/maintenance",
    "request_id": "req_9e6b1f7c-2d4a-4b83-9c51-7f0ad3e8b642",
    "event_id": null
  }
}