418 I'm a Teapot: what it means and what to do
This one is real, and it is a joke, and both facts are official. In 1998 the Internet Engineering Task Force published RFC 2324, the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, as an April Fools document. It defined status 418 for a teapot asked to brew coffee. The code survived: the IANA status code registry lists 418 as reserved so that nothing else can claim the number, and a handful of services use it as a lighthearted way to say the server refuses to do what was asked.
If you just saw a 418
- Reload the page or retry the action. In the wild, a 418 is usually a playful stand-in for a refusal or a temporary block. The service is not broken in any way you can act on.
- Check whether you hit an anti-bot measure. Some sites answer bots, scrapers, and VPN traffic with a 418 instead of an obvious block page. Visiting as a normal browser, from a normal connection, usually avoids it.
- Treat it as a no. Occasionally a service uses 418 to mean the request is understood but will not be performed on principle. Retrying harder will not change the answer.
If it is your site or your API
- Know that you are shipping a joke. Some frameworks return 418 from their test endpoints or as an easter egg. It is harmless, occasionally beloved, and guaranteed to confuse someone's monitoring dashboard eventually.
- Do not use it for real failures. Real refusals deserve real codes, 400, 403, 404, 422, so that clients and logs mean something. Save 418 for deliberate whimsy.
- Remember the clients. A few HTTP libraries treat unknown or unusual codes awkwardly. A 418 in a production path will, sooner or later, meet one.
Everyone: nothing is wrong with the teapot. It simply refuses to brew coffee, and since 1998 that has been its documented position.
Common questions
Is 418 an official status code? It is listed in the official IANA registry as reserved, with its definition in RFC 2324 and a later reference in RFC 9110. It is not a standard code servers are expected to use, but the number is officially held so no other meaning can take it.
Why would a real website return a joke code? As an easter egg, as a gentle refusal for requests the service will never honor, or as an anti-bot response that automated tools do not expect. A small number of well-known sites have used it for years for exactly those reasons.
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