Server error

503 503 Service Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to handle the request — overloaded, or deliberately in maintenance mode. It is the correct code for planned downtime.

Common causes

  • Traffic beyond capacity.
  • A maintenance mode flag left switched on.
  • An auto-scaling group with no healthy instances.

How to fix it

  • During planned maintenance, return 503 with a Retry-After header: search engines come back rather than de-indexing you.
  • Never serve a maintenance page with a 200 status — that tells search engines your content is now the maintenance notice.

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