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sbrownnw's avatar
sbrownnw
Explorer | Level 4
3 years ago

Dropbox API Service Error: 503 Service Unavailable is in HTML format

Using the Dropbox .net API, I received the following error one time making a file move call.  Why is it formatted as HTML?  Isn't that assuming only a webpage is making the client call, which is not ...
Developers
Greg-DB's avatar
Greg-DB
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
3 years ago

A 503 error like that can indicate a general service availability issue. That should be transient and resolve after a short period of time. Depending on the particular kind of failure on the Dropbox infrastructure, you may see the response body take different forms like this. Regardless, when you receive a response with a 503 status code, you can perform an automatic retry, ideally with an exponential backoff.

sbrownnw's avatar
sbrownnw
Explorer | Level 4
3 years ago

I am not concerned about the actual error itself (yes, 503 errors can happen some times for a hosted service).  I am reporting the error should not be specifically formatted as HTML, as that assumes a webpage or HTML capable client is making the API call.

  • Greg-DB's avatar
    Greg-DB
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    3 years ago

    Thanks for the feedback! I'll pass this along to the team to see if we can have those kinds of failures not return HTML to API clients, but I can't promise if or when that might be done.

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