Revision 1096227 of 503 Service Unavailable

<div>{{HTTPSidebar}}</div>

<p>The HTTP <code><strong>503</strong></code><strong><code> Service Unavailable</code></strong> server error response code indicates that the server is not ready to handle the request.</p>

<p>Common causes are a server that is down for maintenance or that is overloaded. Note that together with this response, a user-friendly page explaining the problem should be sent. This responses should be used for temporary conditions and the {{HTTPHeader("Retry-After")}} HTTP&nbsp;header should, if possible, contain the estimated time for the recovery of the service.</p>

<p>Caching-related headers that are sent along with this response should be taken care of, as a 503 status is often a temporary condition and responses should usually not be cached.</p>

<h2 id="Status">Status</h2>

<pre class="syntaxbox">
503 Service Unavailable</pre>

<h2 id="Specifications">Specifications</h2>

<table class="standard-table">
 <tbody>
  <tr>
   <th scope="col">Specification</th>
   <th scope="col">Title</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <td>{{RFC("7231", "503 Service Unavailable" , "6.6.4")}}</td>
   <td>Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content</td>
  </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>

<h2 id="Browser_compatibility">Browser compatibility</h2>

<p class="hidden">The compatibility table in this page is generated from structured data. If you’d like to contribute to the data, please check out <a href="https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/README.md">https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/README.md</a> and send us a pull request.</p>

<p>{{Compat}}</p>

<h2>See also</h2>

<ul>
 <li>{{HTTPHeader("Retry-After")}}</li>
</ul>