503 Service Unavailable

Hi,

It sounds like it is the MailChimp firewall blocking your server’s IP.

If you have SSH access to your server, running the following command provides a quick way to test if remote requests to the MailChimp server should actually work.

curl -v https://us1.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/?apikey=test
Replace us1 with the characters in the end or your API key, after the minus sign.
Replace test with everything in front of the minus sign of your API key.

If cURL gives you a Akamai response this means that the IP address of your website is blacklisted by the Akamai firewall (because of poor reputation). This is most likely if you are on shared hosting as some of the other users on the same IP might have caused the issue.

Akamai is the firewall MailChimp and many other major websites use to protect their servers, which is why this is somewhat harder to fix.

When this happens, we recommend you to change your IP address because having a bad reputation at Akamai does not just affect the MailChimp API.

There are various ways to go about this.

Ask your webhost for a new IP address.
Migrate to a new webhost if your hosting company is unwilling to fulfill your request.
Configure your server to connect to the MailChimp API server using a proxy.

Hope that helps, let me know if you have any questions.

Hi there,

I too am getting an error suddenly when using your plugin => [2016-11-15 06:54:11] ERROR: Form 3009 > MailChimp API error: 503 Service Unavailable.

I followed everything mentioned in this post: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/api-status-not-connected-2

And I followed the guidelines here as well as the top poster: https://mc4wp.com/kb/solving-connectivity-issues/

I also ran the command you mention above using SSH and received a lot of info, but nothing from Akamai. We are using your premium boxzilla plugin with your regular mailchimp plugin and everything was working fine for several weeks until yesterday. We have a staging server with the exact same setup, except a different API key and that always connects. I have tried switching the API keys and the live site just always gives a 503 error.

The last part of the ssh curl response message says ‘* Connection #0 to host us5.api.mailchimp.com left intact’ among a lot of account details that I can’t post to a public site.

Is there anything else we can do? This seems weird that suddenly it stops working. I have also tried updating to the latest plugin versions and no luck either.

Hey,

Just to add a further bit to this. Today for some reason everything is now working, after doing nothing to change the settings. Do you know why the API would have a hiccup where it won’t work for a few days?

Since there have been no replies to this topic for awhile I will now close this ticket as resolved.
If you still have a problem or you have a similar problem as posted above, please open a NEW topic. Thank you!