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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 the case for my development, which is a service to service call via your client API.

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Greg-DB

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

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

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.