What is 503 Service Unavailable Error?

Arguably one of the most common errors people tend to encounter when browsing the Internet, it would be hard to find someone who has never seen Error 503 Service Unavailable on their screen. There are many different variations of this error, such as “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable”, “HTTP Server Error 503”, “HTTP 503”, “503 Error” and others. What they all have in common is the number 503 and the fact they basically still refer to the same thing. The 503 Service unavailable error is an HTTP status code, which is a standard response code, transited from the website’s server. Basically, it translates to the server not being available at that time. The reason why it may look as differently, as illustrated above, is purely due to whether or not the message had been customized by the specific website or the server software that transmits it.

Two main causes

There are two main causes for Error 503 to be appearing and they both have to do with the server of the website you’re trying to view. One reason is that the server is simply too busy and is overloaded. Another reason is that there may be some maintenance going on at that specific time. Either way, these are things your computer has nothing to with, as the problem is on the server’s side. Yes, sometimes, in very rare cases, it might have to do with your machine being in conflict with a given site, but for the most part that is very unlikely. However, even though the issue not being on your side, there are still ways to fix it, which we will show you here.

HTTP Error 503 – Service Unavailable

1. Simply try reloading the page. You can do that either by pressing F5 on your keyboard or using the Refresh button. In many cases this will be enough to have the problem solved, as the issue on the other side is usually only temporary.
2. Restart your modem (router). After this, make sure to also restart your PC.
3. In case neither of the above work and you have a pressing issue that needs to be addressed by accessing the website, you can try contacting the website admins. Check online for the contact details of the site you are trying to reach, there are lists available for the most popular websites and many of those have social media pages with support there to assist you, if need be.
4. Wait. As pointed out earlier, the server might be overcrowded with users such as yourself. It could help if you just tried visiting the page again later, as often this is exactly the case.

Eureka!

If you are encountering Error 503 on your own website, there are several other things you can try doing. For example, something may have crashed, so you might want to try and restart all running processes. Perhaps your website may have all of a sudden gained more traffic than it was intended for. Also check for things like bandwidth throttling and connection limits.

We will be glad to know if our fixes were able to help you solve your problem, so please don’t hesitate to leave us a comment below!