# Maintenance Mode

> Maintenance mode will be deprecated in 2025 as we upgrade our infrastructure.

Once or twice per year, Clerk undergoes maintenance on its infrastructure and enters **Maintenance Mode**. During this time, users who are already signed in will not be signed out, and will continue to have access to your app. However, new sign-ups, sign-ins and user mutations will return an error. **Maintenance Mode** is a special operational state designed to minimize disruption for signed-in users during critical database upgrades or outages.

## Production instances

Mutation methods (`POST`, `PATCH`, `PUT`, `DELETE`) will be rejected with a `SystemUnderMaintenance` error. This includes all new sign-ups and sign-ins.

Active sessions, and session refresh requests **are not** affected. This applies to `GET` requests as well as session refresh requests ([`/touch`](https://clerk.com/docs/reference/frontend-api/tag/sessions/post/v1/client/sessions/%7Bsession_id%7D/touch) and [`/tokens`](https://clerk.com/docs/reference/frontend-api/tag/sessions/post/v1/client/sessions/%7Bsession_id%7D/tokens) endpoints). Users who are already signed in will not be signed out and will continue to have access to your app. However, any mutations to their user or org data will return the same `SystemUnderMaintenance` error.

### API errors

All mutations from both the Frontend API and the Backend API will return the following `SystemUnderMaintenance` error.

```json
// 503 StatusServiceUnavailable
{
  "shortMessage": "System under maintenance",
  "longMessage": "We are currently undergoing maintenance and only essential operations are permitted. We will be back shortly.",
  "code": "maintenance_mode"
}
```

### UI components

During **Maintenance Mode**, Clerk's UI components will display the following error for sign-ins, sign-ups, and all mutations to user and org data.

![The <SignIn /> component with a maintenance mode error.](https://clerk.com/docs/raw/_public/images/maintenance-mode/maintenance-mode-error.png)

## Development instances

For development instances, all requests will return a `SystemUnderMaintenance ` error, and the instance will be completely unavailable.

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## Sitemap

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