418 I'm a Teapot
A joke code from the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol. It is not part of HTTP and should never be returned by a real service.
At a glance
- Status code
- 418 I'm a Teapot
- Class
- 4xx, client error, the request itself is the problem
- Defined in
- RFC 2324, an April Fools document
- Cacheable by default
- no
- Response body
- Optional.
In detail
RFC 2324 was published on 1 April 1998 and defines a protocol for coffee pots. 418 is returned by a teapot asked to brew coffee.
It survives because it is useful for testing that a client handles unknown status codes, and because attempts to remove it from server frameworks met resistance.
If a production API returns 418, it is either a deliberate joke endpoint or an anti-bot layer refusing a request without explaining why.
Examples
HTTP/1.1 418 I'm a Teapot
Content-Type: text/plain
I am a teapotThings that catch people out
- It is not registered in the IANA HTTP status registry as a usable code, so intermediaries have no defined behaviour for it.
- Using it as a real error code means monitoring and client libraries will classify it as an unknown 4xx and give up.
Try it: HTTP Request Builder
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Related HTTP status codes
All http status codes →400 Bad Request
The server refused the request because it was malformed. The client must change something before retrying, because repeating the same bytes will fail.
403 Forbidden
The server understood the request and refuses to fulfil it. Unlike 401, sending different credentials will not help.
451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons
Access is denied because of a legal demand, such as a court order or a government blocking request.
421 Misdirected Request
The request reached a server that cannot produce a response for the requested authority, usually a connection reuse problem under HTTP/2.
422 Unprocessable Content
The request was well-formed and understood, but the values inside it failed validation. The syntax was fine and the semantics were not.
423 Locked
The resource is locked by WebDAV and cannot be modified until the lock is released or a valid lock token is supplied.
Tools for this
- HTTP Request Builder Free online HTTP request builder - build and test HTTP requests with custom headers and body
- HTTP Headers Checker Free online HTTP headers checker - view HTTP response headers for any URL