Indexing API Error: 503 The service is currently unavailable

[eg14]

Hello everyone, my name is Emre Gulaydin and I work as Growth Marketing Lead at JobLeads. We are a job search & career coaching platform. We have been using the indexing API in order to push updates for our jobs that go to Google for Jobs for more than 2 months.

All of a sudden since April 3rd, we started to have 503 errors in the indexing API with an increasing rate. We have had no releases on production that would change/impact the indexing API at all. We have no problem whatsoever with the quotas.

I saw that 2 major incidents also happened on April 3rd & 4th, may be some after-effects still. But this is pretty much a wild guess.

https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/k2MExAhhXTjyS4LSi8hk

https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/MienCfpExt57cMBTgL4x

Anyone could point me in the right direction as to what is going on & how we can solve this?

Thank you.

[munish1]

Hello @eg14 Emre Gulaydin,

Welcome to GCC!

Please see the above screenshot. Please share the similar screenshot choosing only the API in question and getting all the 8 graphs.

[eg14]

Hello @munish1 thank you for getting back to me.

Here are the screenshots you asked for, I hope you can make some sense of them 🙂

Thank you in advance.

[munish1 · Accepted solution]

Thanks @eg14 Interestingly, Traffic by Credentials is only via "JobLeads GFJ" but errors by credentials is only from the Service account. Looks like this service account is trying to call the indexing APIs and is getting into 503 errors. Please find out the details of this SA and see if some IAM permissions changed for this service account around Apr 4th

[eg14]

We found out that the service account email was somehow deleted from the Google search console property. Once added back the error rate went down to 0% immediately. I advise not to overlook this small detail for other users.

Thanks for the help.