503 Service unavailable

[Inzanity]

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.

[mherger]

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

[KMatuszak]

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.

[mherger]

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...

[Inzanity]

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. 

[KMatuszak]

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:

[mherger]

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.

[Inzanity]

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.

[mherger]

See also: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/API-me-player-devices-return-status-quot-503...

[tsubarah]

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?

[Inzanity · Accepted solution]

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. 

[nutella]

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