Are you frustrated with Magento 503 service temporarily unavailable error?

Magento users usually see Magento 503 service unavailable error when trying to access the admin or storefront in a browser.

The 503 error means the webserver was not available on demand.

At Bobcares, we often receive requests to solve this Magento errors as part of our Server Management Services.

Today, let’s discuss this error in detail and see how our Support Engineers fix it for our customers.

Why Magento 503 service temporarily unavailable error occurs?

Let’s now do an in-depth analysis of the error.

When installing Magento, it creates maintenance.flag file to show a system message until it finishes the update operation.

It helps to cover the screen from the users during the process in case of any errors or problems. Technically, Magento removes this system message after completing the operation.

At times, the maintenance.flag file will not delete automatically after the operation completes. As a result, Magento website shows the Service Temporary Unavailable error even after the update process.

The typical error message like this:

Similarly, Magento store owners face this error after trying to install security patches for Magento. As a result, they may not even be able to open the admin page or see any sort of errors on the page. Furthermore, access to all pages on Magento site results in the error.

“Service Temporarily Unavailable The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.”

In short, the store won’t be available at all when there is an error 503.

How we fix the Magento 503  error?

To fix this error our Support Engineers find out the .maintenance. flag file in the var folder. Usually, after the installation process server automatically deletes this file.

But due to some error, the deletion of this file may not always happen. At times, Magento creates this file again causing problems like error 503.

Therefore, to fix the error, we disable the maintenance mode.

1. Disabling the maintenance mode.

Let’s now see how our Support Engineers disable the maintenance mode of the Magento for our customers.

To do this,

1. We first go to the Magento root folder.
2. Then we find out the file .maintenance.flag and delete this file from the root folder. The location of the file depends on the version of Magento.
3. After that, we refresh Magento cache from php bin/magento cache:flush or via the Admin Panel.
4. If we see a message saying “Exception printing is disabled by default for security reasons.”, then we check the error log.
5. In case we get an error like “Please Upgrade your database” then we run php bin/magento setup:upgrade from the root directory to fix this error.

Note: The maintenance mode file location differs for Magento 1 and Magento 2.

• Magento 1.x: Delete maintenance.flag file from >> Magento root folder
• Magento 2.x: Delete .maintenance.flag file from >> Magento root folder/var

This fixes the customer’s Magento 503 error. Finally, the store starts working again.

[Need help in fixing Magento errors? We are right here to help you.]

Conclusion

In short, Magento 503 service temporarily unavailable error shows the unavailability of webserver on demand. This error occurs when trying to access the admin or storefront in a browser. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers fix this error for our customers.