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598 Network Read Timeout Error

Non-standard proxy code indicating a network read timeout behind the proxy.

Status

HTTP/1.1 598 Network Read Timeout Error

Details

  • Category: 5xx
  • Status: Unofficial (Legacy HTTP proxies). Not registered with IANA. A server, framework, or CDN convention.
  • Specification: none, not defined by any RFC
  • Cacheable: Not cacheable
  • Response body: Allowed
  • Retry: Retry after a delay

598 was used by some proxy implementations to report that reading from the upstream timed out. It is not registered and never appeared in a specification, but it survives in older proxy software and in monitoring tools that inherited the convention.

The standard equivalent is 504.

Common causes

  • The upstream server stopped sending data before the response was complete.
  • Network instability between the proxy and the upstream.

How to fix it

As the client

  • Retry with backoff, and raise read timeouts if the endpoint is genuinely slow.

As the server

  • Return 504, which clients and monitoring already understand.

Examples

A proxy read timeout

HTTP response

HTTP/1.1 598 Network read timeout error

See also