Hi Shayne,
I am sorry you experienced this error. It appears to have happened during a short system outage we had recently. 
The species URL you gave does work fine now.

This is a rather unusual thing and I hope you do not encounter this problem often. If it is a crucial piece of your system you could consider adding retries after failures or processing failed ids in a second run. If you hit a 503 error it is very likely that our entire API is down though (some seconds to a few minutes), so putting your script to sleep for a short time would be good.

Hope it all works fine for you now. 
Please let us know is you still encounter problems!

best,
Markus




--
Markus Döring
Software Developer
Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)
mdoering@gbif.org
http://www.gbif.org





On 07 Jul 2014, at 23:55, Urbanowski, Shayne <surbanowski@usgs.gov> wrote:

Hello-

I have a list of 348782 taxonKeys for which I need the canonicalName. I'm using the species web service (http://api.gbif.org/v0.9/species) within a script to get this data.  The web service works well for the first 3000 or 4000 records and then throws the following error.  Can you assist me in resolving (or working around) this issue.  The list of taxonKeys is posted at: ftp://bison.ornl.gov/pub/bison/out/outspecies1of2.txt

http://api.gbif.org/v0.9/species/5278064

Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 1016539404
Varnish cache server

Thanks in advance,

--
Shayne Urbanowski
COMSO - USGS CSAS
o: 303-202-4299
m: 720-280-3210
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