topic Re: 503 Service unavailable in Spotify for Developers

503 Service unavailable

Inzanity — Sat, 14 Jan 2023 22:38:16 GMT

For a few weeks or even months, I'm regularly getting 503 Service Unavailable in my requests. Seems to be mostly when accessing any of the
https://api.spotify.com/v1/me/player endpoints. I think it prominently started after the issues back in September of 2022 when the device endpoint was not working at all for a few days.

Re: 503 Service unavailable

mherger — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 11:31:05 GMT

Wanted to add my voice here. I'm seeing the same.

Re: 503 Service unavailable

KMatuszak — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 17:18:38 GMT

I've been using the Spotify API in my application for a long time and everything worked fine, unfortunately for three days half of the requests to https://api.spotify.com/v1/me/player end with a response with status code 503 and information { error : { status: 503, message: 'Service unavailable' } }, I also noticed the 502 code a few times.

Re: 503 Service unavailable

mherger — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 17:31:16 GMT

Unfortunately it's not even limited to this particular endpoint. I've seen it on me/following, too. Tried to get in touch with Spotify on Twitter, but they sent me to developer.spotify.com - which only has a Twitter handle as contact, which can't be messaged...

Re: 503 Service unavailable

Inzanity — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 17:41:08 GMT

The support for developers is straight-up garbage. The only way of communication is this "forum". But even then, you barely get any helpful answers.

Re: 503 Service unavailable

KMatuszak — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 18:46:52 GMT

I managed to work around the problem in this way, it works fine, maybe someone will find it useful if their application is written in JS/TS:

Re: 503 Service unavailable

mherger — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 19:23:10 GMT

A user of my application has suggested something similar to me, and it seems to be working for him, too. At least you have a maximum retry number - he doesn't... but this kind of retry can cause an additional load on the failing infrastructure, potentially leading to a longer time for recovery as the service might struggle with the higher number of requests. You should add some back-off strategy, too: with each re-try you should increase the delay.

Re: 503 Service unavailable

Inzanity — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 19:31:36 GMT

I implemented the same procedure but with at max 5 tries and 1-second delay. But this is not the fix for an obvious issue on Spotify's end.

Re: 503 Service unavailable

mherger — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 08:33:34 GMT

Re: 503 Service unavailable

tsubarah — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 08:54:45 GMT

I am having a similair issue but I am using the

react-spotify-web-playback, which means I am not doing my own requests. Is there some way to catch the problem even if I am using the premade web-playback?

Re: 503 Service unavailable

Inzanity — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 23:17:37 GMT

Seems like they got their **bleep** together and the issue is far less occurring for me. I had 5 503s within 4 hours on a 1 second request delay.

Re: 503 Service unavailable

nutella — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 13:58:18 GMT

Same here. It seems to work as normal now (which means that it only fails rarely now) 🙂