For more information regarding the security incident at F5, the actions we are taking to address it, and our ongoing efforts to protect our customers, click here.

Forum Discussion

Karthick1's avatar
Karthick1
Icon for Cirrus rankCirrus
Dec 05, 2025

F5 XC 503 upstream_reset_before_response_started{protocol_error}

Hello Community,

I would like to share some additional information regarding the 503 response code in F5 XC. When the origin server sends a response to XC that is not compliant with HTTP RFC standards, the platform may return a 503.

For example, if the origin server responds with a 204 status code but includes a message body, Envoy (the underlying data plane) will treat this as RFC non-compliant and therefore block the content. As a result, XC will return a 503 response to the client.

503

upstream_reset_before_response_started{protocol_error}

Check if the http response headers from the origin-server have any invalid field names. Query the the origin-server directly via cURL or something equivalent. Usually indicates that XC is seeing an

error in one of the http-headers of the response from the server. We would need to see the http

headers that the origin-server is responding with to identify the issue.

 

In one of the scenarios, it was seen that the origin-server may have a total of more than 100 headers

(mostly duplicate headers), which XC will treat as failure parsing the response.

2 Replies

  • Nikoolayy1​  yes i am planning to do the same , i have added the another one you can check this as well. 

     

    https://community.f5.com/discussions/TechnicalForum/f5-xc-http-404-rout-not-found--rsp-code-404/344330