What does 502 Bad Gateway mean?

The "502 Bad Gateway" status code is an HTTP response indicating that a server, acting as a gateway or proxy, received an invalid response from an upstream server. This typically occurs when the server is unable to communicate properly with another server or service that it relies on to fulfill the request.

For example, if a website’s server tries to retrieve data from a third-party API and the API server fails to respond correctly, the server will return a 502 Bad Gateway error. This error often points to server-side issues, such as a misconfigured server, network problems, or a temporary outage of the upstream service.