Consistent HTTP 500 Errors on Graph API (/images and /map_features) Endpoints Since Nov 7

1

Hi everyone,

Since November 8, I’ve been consistently getting HTTP 500 responses from the Mapillary Graph API when calling both:

  • https://graph.mapillary.com/images

  • https://graph.mapillary.com/map_features

Even small bounding boxes (e.g.

bbox=-124.46,40.37,-124.37,40.40

) return the same message:

{"error":{"code":1,"message":"An unknown error occurred","error_subcode":99}}

Example debug ID: 7956b2df35f7221c77c0838832916014

I’ve tried:

  • Using much smaller bounding boxes

  • Adding random delays between calls

  • Confirming that my access token is valid

Despite this, all requests return HTTP 500, with only rare HTTP 200 responses (intermittent).
This started suddenly — my Python crawler was working fine until about three days ago, downloading thousands of boxes successfully.

Could someone from the Mapillary team confirm if there’s a backend issue or maintenance affecting the Graph API endpoints?

Thanks for your help,
Farhad Salemi
California Integrated Travel Project (Cal-ITP)

1 Like
2

@knikel - do you have any thoughts on this one?

1 Like
3

@farhadsalemi1 : Albeit a bit cryptic, this error indicates a generic timeout. Likely there was too much data in the given bbox and serving it is causing a timeout. Very densely captured areas might timeout sometimes despite relatively small bounding boxes. As an alternative you might want to consider GitHub - mapillary/mapillary-python-sdk: A Python 3 library built on the Mapillary API v4 to facilitate retrieving and working with Mapillary data., especially for crawling larger areas. Hope this helps until we find a good middle ground between the timeout and bbox size values.

You can use it as such (assuming you pip installed it):

"""
Getting image coordinates from a nearby set of coordinates
"""

import mapillary.interface as mly
import json

mly.set_access_token("FIXME")
data = mly.map_feature_points_in_bbox(bbox={
    'west': -110.247350,
    'south': 31.426442,
    'east': -110.238745,
    'north': 31.430443
})

file_name = "get_map_features_in_bbox_controller.json"
with open(file_name, mode="w") as f:
    json.dump(data, f, indent=4)
4

Just commenting to +1 this issue. I have been getting frequent 500 errors during Graph API requests. I only started noticing on 11/11 but was not really using the custom application for the few days leading up to it, so I would imagine I would’ve also been experiencing issues since 11/8. Ive also confirmed that the access token is valid and tried tweaking my code to adjust image filtering parameters - no success with any changes.

5

We did change underlying spatial indexing services in October. I’ll investigate if something change in other components that we depend on around the beginning of November. Appreciate all the reports!