CODEWITHSUNDEEP
facebookfacebook-graph-api
Brian Ray
Brian Ray

Reputation: 1276

Facebook error: "An unexpected error has occurred. Please retry your request later."

Starting last Friday, 7/13, we've been getting the "An unexpected error has occurred. Please retry your request later." error for our OG Graph object posts. With the same API post rate, our error rate for these API calls went from 0.13% to 65% (less than 1% to 65%) within about a minute. Saturday it dropped to about 46%, and it's currently at 28%.

We normally have these automatically retried, but we had to disable that when the error rate rose because it choked our queue.

If we manually retry any of the failed ones, they fail every time with this error.

This seems to be happening only for one of our OG action/object combos - "earn medal". All our other combos work fine with manual testing.

Since our error rate jumped suddenly, is very high, and retrying doesn't work, something obviously seems wrong.

Could we be over a rate limit? Did something happen to our "medal" OG Object?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 66955

Answers (7)

James Simmons
James Simmons

Reputation: 11

I don't know if you resolved this yet. I had this error message apear on my screen when trying to boost posts or do certain other things on Facebook. I finally figured out my spyware, Kaspersky Internet Security, was interfering with the function. If you have this or another anti-virus program try temporarily disabling or pausing protection. This means you will be dealing with sensitive data without your anti-virus program, but your native firewalls and virus protections will still be in place. It is annoying... sometimes Kaspersky acts more like a virus than an anti-virus. Perhaps facebook support people can take note of this, too, as this may resolve the problem for the many who are having it and not finding solution through your suggested steps (for instance, with Kaspersky on, I cannot access ad manager either...)

Upvotes: 1

alex.sera
alex.sera

Reputation: 19

I did some testing, and if I change the server that sent the request, and therefore change the machine and IP address, the same data are taken is facebook.

Upvotes: 0

Tony
Tony

Reputation: 19181

It's worthing noting this error can occur somewhat randomly without reasonable cause. I've seen this many times when fetching facebook posts for a page depending on the limit parameter. If I ask for facebook posts of a page with limit 100, I'll get the error:

{
  error: {
    message: "An unexpected error has occurred. Please retry your request later.",
    type: "OAuthException",
    is_transient: true,
    code: 2
  }
}

If I ask for it with limit 2, I won't get the error. You may be thinking a timeout could cause this. It's possible because I've seen that before (when you request a ton of data) but in this case increasing the limit to 3 also causes the error. limit=2 is fine while limit=3 causes the above error. That's a bug

Upvotes: 2

revoke
revoke

Reputation: 559

I was looking for a solution about eight hours and in my case was the problem with name "An unexpected error has occurred. Please retry your request later." in a bad PAGE ID... OMG

Upvotes: 1

Bhavesh Agarwal
Bhavesh Agarwal

Reputation: 623

I was getting this error while posting some open graph actions and objects on my facebook timeline, but the issue I discovered was basically with the cache facebook maintains.

I made some "og" meta-tags changes in my object URLs (talking about Open Graph objects here), and somehow facebook was giving the same error as mentioned in the main question because it was not taking the changes on refreshing my page completely. Then, to refresh those from the facebook side, I had to just debug my object URLs (both 'http' and 'https' ones) from facebook debugger and voila !

Upvotes: 0

Rumesh Pathmalal
Rumesh Pathmalal

Reputation: 19

try this. it works for me

<?php 
$url = 'https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/echo?q='. $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] ;
$response = file_get_contents($url);

?>

Upvotes: 0

Brian Ray
Brian Ray

Reputation: 1276

After some more manual testing, we realized this was only happening for a specific instance of our "medal" OG Object (id 4). Others worked fine. So we tried some of those instances (ids 1 through 5) in FB's URL debugger, and they all parsed fine.

Then tried to post those medals again manually, and id 4 then worked every time.

It seems like FB automatically scraped our OG Objects last Friday, and the medal id 4 object request failed for some reason, causing that object's cache to disappear on FB's end.

So if you see a sudden, large increase in OG Object API call errors, try manually re-caching the object instances that failed.

Upvotes: 3

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