502 Bad Gateway
HTTP is a protocol that is implemented by servers and clients, but there is a third category: proxies.
When a system is acting as a proxy for a different server, and that server is
misbehaving or doing something unexpected, the proxy can return
502 Bad Gateway
to tell a client that the proxy is working fine, but
there was something wrong with the ‘origin’ server instead.
A specific example of this could be a CDN in front on a web server, and the web-server is misconfigured and responding with incorrect HTTP responses.
This status should not be used if the origin server just returned a valid HTTP error itself, because these should generally just be forwarded by the proxy (mostly) unaltered.
Example
HTTP/1.1 502 Bad Gateway
Content-Type text/plain
We made a HTTP request to an origin server, but we got a Gopher response back.
References
- RFC7231, Section 6.6.3 - 502 Bad Gateway
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