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424 Failed Dependency

The request failed because an earlier request it depended on failed.

Status

HTTP/1.1 424 Failed Dependency

Details

  • Category: 4xx
  • Status: Standard. Registered with IANA and defined by a current standards-track RFC.
  • Specification: RFC 4918 §11.4
  • Cacheable: Not cacheable
  • Response body: Allowed
  • Retry: Retry only after changing the request

424 appears inside WebDAV multistatus responses. If a request touches several resources and one step fails, the operations that depended on it are reported as 424 rather than being attributed a failure of their own.

Some non-WebDAV APIs borrow it for batch or workflow endpoints to mark steps skipped because of an earlier failure. The action itself was never attempted, which distinguishes it from a genuine error.

Common causes

  • A member of a multi-resource operation failed and dependent members were abandoned.
  • A batch job step was skipped because a prerequisite step errored.

How to fix it

As the client

  • Find and fix the root failure. Retrying the dependent step alone will fail the same way.
  • Parse the full multistatus body to see which member actually failed.

As the server

  • Point at the failing dependency in the error body so clients do not have to correlate by hand.

Examples

A step abandoned after its dependency failed

Log

<D:response>
  <D:href>/dav/team/report.docx</D:href>
  <D:status>HTTP/1.1 424 Failed Dependency</D:status>
</D:response>

Specifications

See also