Why do I get 503 Service Unavailable errors using the Google Cloud Datastore API explorer?

Question

I submitted the following request using the API explorer in the Google Cloud Console:

{
"query": {
"kinds": [
{
"name": "Car"
}
],
"filter": {
"propertyFilter": {
"property": {
"name": "car_name"
},
"operator": "equal",
"value": {
"stringValue": "Honda"
}
}
}
}
}

And I got the following response:

{
"error": {
"errors": [
{
"domain": "global",
"reason": "backendError",
"message": "Backend Error"
}
],
"code": 503,
"message": "Backend Error"
}
}

I've authenticated with OAuth as well. Why won't this work?

Answer 1

I see these errors myself sometimes. AFAIK, this basically says "You did everything right, but Google is having some trouble handling your request."

If you see this happening a lot, you should check status.cloud.google.com to see if there are any known issues.

In short: there's not much you can do about a 503 Backend Error. :(