Troubleshooting

Discover solutions to commonly encountered questions when Getting Started.

Errors

Thumbtack uses conventional HTTP response codes to indicate the success or failure of an API request.

In general:

200 response code indicates success.
Codes in the 4xx range indicate an error that failed given the information provided (e.g., a required parameter was omitted, url formatted incorrectly, etc.).
Codes in the 5xx range indicate an error with Thumbtack's servers.

HTTP Response Code	Description	Notes
200	OK	Everything works as expected
202	WAF Silent Challenge	WAF issued a silent challenge to the request.
400	Bad Request	The request was unacceptable, often due to missing a required parameter.
401	Unauthorized	Invalid auth key provided.
403	Forbidden	The request was from a blocked IP or User Agent.
404	Not Found	The requested resource doesn’t exist.
429	Rate Limited	Too many requests hit the API too quickly.
451	Forbidden due to sanctioned countries	The request was made from a sanctioned country (North Korea, Syria, Iran, etc).
502	Invalid audience parameter (proxy_oauth_failed)	Please view the Common Issues section below for more details.
5XX	Server Errors	Something went wrong on Thumbtack's end.

Common Issues

invalid_client

If you receive a 401 Unauthorized response when hitting the /oauth2/token endpoint, your response body may look like:

{
  "error": "invalid_client",
  "error_description": "Client authentication failed (e.g., unknown client, no client authentication included, or unsupported authentication method)."
}

This is due to a Client not being found in the associated Environment's OAuth Authorization Server. To resolve this, ensure that you are using the correct OAuth Authorization Server, clientID, and clientSecret for the desired Environment.

token is not active

If you receive a 401 Unauthorized response when hitting an API endpoint, your response body may look like:

{
  "type": "about:blank",
  "title": "Unauthorized",
  "status": 401,
  "detail": "invalid token. failure reason(s): [token is not active]"
}

This is due to your access_token having expired. Be sure you utilize an OAuth2 library or the OAuth2 functionality of your API Client to handle refreshing for you.

proxy_oauth_failed

If you receive a 502 Bad Gateway response when hitting an API endpoint, your response body may look like:

{
  "error": "proxy_oauth_failed",
  "detail": "Error: oauth_400:invalid_request: The request is missing a required parameter, includes an invalid parameter value, includes a parameter more than once, or is otherwise malformed. Requested audience '<your audience>' has not been whitelisted by the Auth 2.0 Client."
}

This is caused by an incorrect value for the audience parameter. The audience parameter must be set to urn:partner-api.