404 Not Found
No such thing — or you are not allowed to know whether there is.
404Client error
- What it means
- No such thing — or you are not allowed to know whether there is.
- In practice
- The famous one. Either the URL is wrong, the thing was deleted, or the server is deliberately hiding its existence from you (many APIs return 404 rather than 403 for other people’s resources, so attackers cannot map what exists). When an API 404s on something you are sure exists, check the id AND whose credentials you are sending — “wrong account” looks identical to “wrong id” by design. For pages removed on purpose, 410 tells crawlers to stop coming back.
- Whose problem is it?
- The request. Retrying it unchanged will get the same answer.
Often confused with