Error connecting to Mailchimp: 503 Service Unavailable

It seems your hosting server IP is blocked by the MailChimp firewall. When you are on shared hosting you share the IP address with a number of other websites on the same server. It is possible that someone else did something (bad) to get the shared IP on the blocked list.

Akamai is the firewall service MailChimp uses to protect their servers, which is why this is somewhat harder to fix. We recommend you to change your IP address because having a bad reputation at Akamai does not just affect the MailChimp API, but several other websites as well.

There are various ways to fix 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.

Hi @lapzor

Thanks for the quick reply. so the last way is to contact the web hosting provider? Let me try again talk with them. Thanks for your help.

yes, setting up a proxy is usually something that you can’t do yourself / that your hosting provider has to setup for you.

Most hosting providers would instead offer you to buy a private hosting ip for your website.

Hope that helps. If you have any questions, please let me know!

Hello, we are having the same issue with the “503” error. We switched to a private IP 4 days ago and still have the same error. After contacting our web host, they replied with this info:

I tried reviewing the apache error.log for ‘{REMOVED}.com’ but there does
not appear to be any errors. Would it be possible to please enable php
error logging on your server to see if additional troubleshooting
information can be obtained from the php logs –
https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/214199378

I referenced this help document to see if there’s additional information
– https://www.mc4wp.com/kb/solving-connectivity-issues/

I tested the host ‘api.mailchimp.com’ from your web server and it appears
to connect successfully:

@patroller:~/{REMOVED}.com$ curl -v api.mailchimp.com
* Rebuilt URL to: api.mailchimp.com/
* Trying (REMOVED)…
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to api.mailchimp.com (REMOVED) port 80 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: api.mailchimp.com
> User-Agent: curl/7.58.0
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
< Server: AkamaiGHost
< Content-Length: 0
< Location: https://api.mailchimp.com/
< Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2020 05:17:05 GMT
< Connection: keep-alive
<
* Connection #0 to host api.mailchimp.com left intact
> User-Agent: curl/7.58.0

In regards to the Unique IP, it does not appear to be blacklisted when
checking –

Any suggestions for what to try next? Thank you!

Hi,

The error will not show in the PHP log because it’s not a PHP error. It’s a MailChimp API error.

If you bought a private IP and it’s still not working, most commonly the issue is that the outbound cURL connection made by Apache is not using your private IP.

You can ask your hosting support to make absolutely sure that your own private IP is used when making outbound cURL calls via a PHP script, and that it’s not still routed over a shared ip.

The only other possible cause is that the private IP is not “new” and was already blocked, but that is pretty unlikely.

Hope that helps. If you have any questions, please let me know!

The address is not api.mailchimp.com, you need to add your server id in front of it, e.g. us10. It’s the last bit of your API key. You also need to add an API key to do a real test.

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.

However, on more than one occasion we found that the cURL call over SSH is routed differently than a cURL call from PHP.Apache!!!

Hey – thanks a lot for your super quick reply on this. I’m going to forward this info to our web host and hopefully they can take care of us. Your help is much appreciated!!