F5 is upgrading its customer support chat feature on My.F5.com. Chat support will be unavailable from 6am-10am PST on 1/20/26. Refer to K000159584 for details.

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