This thread can be used for queries and updates regarding the current MusicBrainz status/uptime/downtime.
1 Like
We are aware of current issues with the MusicBrainz search. This affects anything that utlises the search (/ws/2/query?), including Picard and other third-party applications.
For a change, we don’t think this is related to scraping! The issue and solution is proving difficult to pinpoint, thank you very much for your kindness and patience.
7 Likes
I have been seeing sporadic errors accessing the website today:
I don’t know if it’s related, but maybe this will help to track down the search issues.
It’s more like your IP is blocked (perhaps for a short duration), email to support with your IP so we can check.
2 Likes
I’m getting a lot of reports from users of my app regarding HTTP 503 Service Unavailable errors when accessing the MusicBrainz API, and I wanted to ask about the current status and any plans to mitigate this.
Our search servers are aging and overloaded. We are working on migrating to better ones but right now you will indeed see more 503 errors on API searches than usual, sorry. @Zas can probably give more precise information.
2 Likes
What’s your app (user agent string)? We don’t have abnormal levels of 503s at the moment, but sometimes global rate limiter is triggering because of sudden high number of queries.
We had to hard cap more than usual to protect our search servers, and we’re working on setting up a new cluster (but it will not be operational before end of November this year).
Also what kind of queries does your app?
3 Likes
Thank you both for the replies!
My app is Mp3tag and its user agent is something like Mp3tag/144 CFNetwork/3860.700.1 Darwin/25.6.0 on macOS and something like Mp3tag/3.36.1 on Windows.
Nothing fancy (I think), it’s usually a two-step process, involving querying a list of releases, e.g.,
https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/?fmt=json&limit=50&query=release:The+Eraser%20AND%20artist:%28Thom+Yorke%29
and then, based on user selection, metadata for a specific release, e.g.,
https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/005f0c9a-05fe-37d6-b3f9-44440968b17f?inc=artists+artist-credits+labels+recordings+release-groups+isrcs&fmt=json
In my own tests, I often have to try several times to get the request to reach the server, but often (maybe even most of the time) I see HTTP 503 or timeouts at the moment.
3 Likes
My personal app I use to clone MB Releases is also frequently getting 503s. In my case, it’s just one API lookup rather than two requests, e.g.
https://beta.musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/<MBID>?inc=artists+labels+recordings+artist-credits+release-groups&fmt=json - I have to retry this ~3 times every time I want to generate a release seed.
The MB website itself, I’m seeing odd data consistency issues I’ve never seen before today. I don’t know if things were reconfigured to be more available and less consistent?
Oh I am glad there is a thread about this and I’m not actually going crazy 
Because lately I noticed more errors when searching and saving* songs compared to months ago.
I started making this app last year where you can make lists of Movies, TV Shows, Anime, Games, Books etc. And eventually I added Music, where I search the recordings from MusicBrainz api for a song and when I save the data I also attach the Youtube video url so I can play the songs from my list throughout the app.
This is my user agent:
session.headers.update({
"User-Agent": f"MediaJournal/{app_version} ( https://github.com/mihail-pop/media-journal )"
})