418 🌐 HTTP

HTTP 418 I'm a teapot

An April Fools’ status from RFC 2324 — some sites and WAFs return it on purpose to tell bots or scrapers to go away.

Seen on: REST API

Meaning

418 was never meant for real use, but it is reserved and widely implemented as an easter egg. In practice you see it when a site’s bot protection deliberately refuses automated requests (missing browser headers, data-center IP), or when a developer used it as a placeholder.

Common causes

  • Bot/WAF protection answering automated clients with 418
  • Placeholder or joke status in an API
  • Rate-limit middleware configured with 418

⚡ Quick fix

  1. Use the site’s official API instead of scraping
  2. Send a realistic User-Agent and respect robots.txt and rate limits
  3. If it’s your own API, replace 418 with a meaningful status (403, 429)

Detailed fix by platform

curl

  1. curl -i -A 'Mozilla/5.0' https://example.com/ # compare with and without a browser User-Agent

How to diagnose

  1. Client — Automated client or browser?
  2. Owner — Your service or a third party?

🔧 Still not fixed?

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