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SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE — Dependency unavailable

Summary

Section titled “Summary”

A backing service the request needs is unavailable. Common dependencies that can fail this way: the primary database, Redis (queue + idempotency cache), or the SPSS microservice.

HTTP status

Section titled “HTTP status”

503 Service Unavailable. Standard envelope. Usually includes Retry-After.

Example response

Section titled “Example response”
{
  "success": false,
  "error": {
    "code": "SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE",
    "message": "A required service is temporarily unavailable. Retry after 30 seconds.",
    "request_id": "req_01HXJZK4ABCDEF",
    "doc_url": "https://docs.surveycoder.io/errors/service-unavailable"
  }
}

Why this happens

Section titled “Why this happens”
  • A dependency hit a transient outage.
  • A deploy or scaling event briefly interrupted traffic.
  • Network connectivity issue between regions.

How to fix it

Section titled “How to fix it”
  1. Respect Retry-After. Sleep that long, then retry once.
  2. Add exponential backoff if multiple retries are needed: 2s, 4s, 8s, capped at 30s.
  3. Use an idempotency key on writes so retries are safe.
  4. For sustained SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE (> 2 minutes), check the status page.
Section titled “Related”