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Tier Credential Custody Unavailable

URI: https://docs.ankatech.co/errors/tier-credential-custody-unavailable
HTTP Status: 503 Service Unavailable

When you see this

The managed tier's live key-protection backend could not be reached to perform the wrap leg of the credential rotation self-test — the leg that runs under the credential already in effect. That leg says nothing about the candidate, which has not been examined, so the refusal is attributed to the platform rather than to the credential you supplied. The response carries a Retry-After header.

Common Causes

  • The tier's key-protection backend is temporarily unreachable — network, endpoint or provider outage.
  • The credential currently in effect could not be unsealed, decoded, or used to build a client.
  • No managed-tier key-protector routing is wired in this deployment, so the verification could not be attempted at all.

Response Example

{
  "type": "https://docs.ankatech.co/errors/tier-credential-custody-unavailable",
  "title": "Tier Credential Custody Unavailable",
  "status": 503,
  "detail": "The tier's key-protection backend is temporarily unreachable, so the credential could not be verified. Nothing was changed; retry the operation shortly.",
  "instance": "/api/v3/admin/platform/key-backend/tiers/ENTERPRISE/credential",
  "timestamp": 1730000000,
  "extensions": {
    "requestId": "550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000"
  }
}

Content-Type: application/problem+json — the response follows RFC 9457 Problem Details.

How to Resolve

  1. Retry after the interval the Retry-After header names. Nothing was swapped — the wrap leg runs before the candidate is sealed, so on this path not even a transient candidate envelope exists.
  2. Do not replace the candidate credential on the strength of this response: it was never examined.
  3. If the condition persists, check the reachability of the tier's key-protection backend from the deployment. The underlying fault is in the server-side log, correlated by the request id.

For full schema definitions, examples, and interactive testing, see the Developer Hub Reference.