Live status of the innovonics app suite.

Summary. A scheduled Meilisearch restart on the shared search host took longer than the default retry window in searchabee’s storefront handlers, causing /storefront/search and /storefront/collection/:handle to return 503 responses for roughly 15 minutes. Filter trees and sort configs were unaffected.

Impact. Merchants using searchabee’s collection filtering saw the sidebar fail to load during the window. Native Shopify collection pages continued to work normally.

Root cause. The Meilisearch restart exceeded the 5-second timeout on searchabee’s storefront read path. The service did not retry because the 503 was returned from the client library, not a transient network error.

Resolution. Added exponential backoff with a 30-second ceiling for Meilisearch client errors that fall through the “service unavailable” bucket. Restored service at 14:27 UTC once the Meilisearch node finished its restart cycle.

Follow-ups. The retry policy is now part of the searchabee integration test suite. We’re also tracking a separate work item to move Meilisearch restarts to a rolling strategy so no single node outage affects live traffic.

Resolved Apr 5, 2026 · 14:27 UTC