cache service unavailable

[VishalBhatSoori]

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What GitHub Actions topic or product is this about?

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i am getting this cache service unavailable from today morning till now

[Radi410]

My tip here would be to Monitor the GitHub Status Page for "Actions" or "API" incidents.
Since it can be a backend outage, there is no configuration change that will fix it. Usually, these spikes are resolved within 1–2 hours.
Force a Fresh Run: If the cache service comes back but your build is still acting weird, try changing your cache "key" version (e.g., from v1 to v2) to force a clean upload once the service is stable.

[VishalBhatSoori]

I actually used the manual caching and it worked the caching service which setup gradle works on the dwfault one was the only one put of service i guess

[VishalBhatSoori]

There was no cache key collision though

[Radi410]

The reason you're seeing a difference is likely because the setup-gradle action and the standard actions/cache can sometimes hit different API endpoints or use different internal logic for how they talk to the GitHub cache service.

When you get that 503 Service Unavailable error, it usually means a specific "load balancer" or a specific part of the caching cluster is overwhelmed. By switching to manual caching, you effectively changed the way the request was bundled or sent, which might have routed it to a healthier part of the service that wasn't struggling as much.

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[devsarwan]

This usually happens when GitHub’s cache backend is temporarily unavailable or overloaded, especially for Actions cache uploads/restores. The 503 Service Unavailable in the log is the main clue here.

I ran into something similar before with setup-gradle caching while normal/manual actions/cache still worked fine. My guess is that different caching methods sometimes hit slightly different backend paths or retry logic internally.

A few things that generally help:

• Check the GitHub Status page for Actions/cache incidents
• Re-run the workflow after some time
• Change the cache key version (v1 → v2) to force a fresh cache
• Temporarily switch to manual caching if setup-gradle caching keeps failing

Since your manual caching worked, it was probably a partial outage on the Gradle cache service path rather than a problem with your workflow config.

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