Long-working API requests now responding with 500 "Unexpected Error (ExtAuthN)"...

sgolux

API requests like the following (that have been working flawlessly for months)…

GET /2.0/sheets/542002634510212?level=2&include=objectValue"

are suddenly responding with 500 errors and the message "Unexpected Error (ExtAuthN)". Status page does not show an issue. Can you help debug?

Isaac A.

Hey @sgolux!,

After reviewing our records, a 500 error typically indicates an issue on Smartsheet's servers or a permanent error with the request. On August 1, 2024, there was an issue related to loading and saving, which might have been the cause of your problem. You can check out our status page for more details: Smartsheet Status Page.

If you're still experiencing this issue, I recommend trying to make the same API calls using Postman to see if the error persists. If it does, please contact our support team at Smartsheet Support, and include as much information as possible, such as the API calls, screenshots of the error message, and the results from Postman.

You may also find our Error Code List helpful.

I hope this information helps!

Cheers,

Isaac.

bsikes

Just wanted to chime in that it looks like we've been getting this internally with Smartsheet as well. Looks like for us, the first instance of it was on the morning of July 8th, and we've received that response 167 times since then - with the latest being a few minutes ago.

bsikes

Hi @sgolux ,

Were you ever able to find anything on this? We're also still periodically getting this error, but it doesn't seem to be reproducible - it just sometimes happens, but not when we retry to failed command. We've also been getting an increased number of (500) Internal Server Error's from Smartsheet lately.

Thank you

sgolux

@bsikes - the day I posted this question we were getting the very specific error described over and over consistently, and that repeated behavior did resolve after some period of time…. from memory I would say a couple of hours. Prior to that I had never seen a 500 error with that particular "(ExtAuthN)" message, but had experienced seemingly random behavior of occasional 500 errors with other unexpected messages. Since then I have seen the "(ExtAuthN)" on occasion, but always as a seemingly random one-off. I have written my own code so that any 500 response will resend the same request a short time (500 to 2000 ms) later, and most frequently this will work, essentially treating it sime a "Service Unavailable" response. This has been an acceptable solution for our use case, in part because we can't seem to get satisfactory and consistent explanations from SmartSheet about what these unexpected errors actually mean, so there seems to be little choice...

bsikes

I'm in the same boat - internal stuff that I've written has retry logic in place so that we never see any problems with this. But we utilize some 3rd party services that also make use of the Smartsheet API, and they're not as willing to updating their code to handle situations where the Smartsheet API throws a random/temporary error.