Same problem for person 3250219, except this time the list of movies is empty.

{
  "page": 1,
  "results": [],
  "total_pages": 1,
  "total_results": 0
}

Here's another interesting data point. When I use the same URL with curl I get the correct person record. But when invoked from Python code (using the requests third-party library) or from the browser (Chrome, Edge, Safari, doesn't matter), I get back the bogus response with the (sometimes empty) list of movies. Also, I should note that for most person records, the API is returning the appropriate person records to the Python script, so it's not like the APIs are completely broken globally. But something is definitely broken somewhere.

Here are some other person IDs for which the API returns the wrong response.

• 2043422
• 35130
• 1791082
• 77464

All of the other bogus records had the same structure illustrated above, with the results sequence of abbreviated movie records, but the response for person 77464 (Sean Douglas) had a different structure:

{
  "id": 63927,
  "imdb_id": "tt5079024",
  "freebase_mid": null,
  "freebase_id": null,
  "tvdb_id": 300059,
  "tvrage_id": null,
  "wikidata_id": null,
  "facebook_id": null,
  "instagram_id": null,
  "twitter_id": null
}

... which looks like an external_ids record.

Hi @bkline,

Indeed, when we execute our database maintenance, this issue happens from time to time. Not sure the cause of it yet, but I've been spending some time trying to figure it out.

I would be curious to see the response headers of each of those requests if they are still returning different payloads.

I am also experiencing this issue this morning, I will be requesting Movie Details and get back what looks like a Discover response or External IDs response, but only happens very rarely, but seems stuck at least for a while. I had one happen last night, and when I tried it again this morning it worked as expected

https://api.themoviedb.org/3/movie/45336?api_key=....

gives me this response

{"id":28940,"page":1,"results":[],"total_pages":0,"total_results":0}

Yes, as soon as the item is purged from cache, everything will be fine.

Hi, @travisbell. I'm surprised you're not able to reproduce the failures yourself. I assume that means the unexpected behavior is sensitive to the api_key value.

Headers from curl:

Host: api.themoviedb.org                                                                                  
user-agent: curl/7.81.0                                                                                   
accept: */*

Headers from Chrome:

Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.7
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br, zstd
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Cookie: ....
If-None-Match: W/"ecca7ceeb42118ed13ab3ab618e56132"
Priority: u=0, i
Sec-Ch-Ua: "Not/A)Brand";v="8", "Chromium";v="126", "Google Chrome";v="126"
Sec-Ch-Ua-Mobile: ?0
Sec-Ch-Ua-Platform: "macOS"
Sec-Fetch-Dest: document
Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate
Sec-Fetch-Site: none
Sec-Fetch-User: ?1
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Headers from Edge:

Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.7
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br, zstd
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Cookie: ....
If-None-Match: W/"ecca7ceeb42118ed13ab3ab618e56132"
Priority: u=0, i
Sec-Ch-Ua: "Not/A)Brand";v="8", "Chromium";v="126", "Microsoft Edge";v="126"
Sec-Ch-Ua-Mobile: ?0
Sec-Ch-Ua-Platform: "macOS"
Sec-Fetch-Dest: document
Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate
Sec-Fetch-Site: none
Sec-Fetch-User: ?1
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/126.0.0.0

Headers from Safari:

Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9
Connection: keep-alive
Host: api.themoviedb.org
Sec-Fetch-Dest: document
Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate
Sec-Fetch-Site: none
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.5 Safari/605.1.15

Headers from Postman:

User-Agent: PostmanRuntime/7.39.0
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Connection: keep-alive

Only curl gets the correct response. All the others (including Postman) get a bogus response.

Thanks. And what about the response headers?

Ah, right. Looking back, I see that this is what you asked for, not the request headers. Apologies. 😊

Headers received when the response is correct (curl):

content-type: application/json;charset=utf-8
content-length: 285
server: openresty
x-memc: HIT
x-memc-key: 1f94dcb1c4defc56b4ca18f012dfbfaa
x-memc-age: 22605
x-memc-expires: 4047
date: Fri, 05 Jul 2024 16:53:53 GMT
cache-control: public, max-age=18019
etag: W/"ba07041f041174da334b6ea348829e98"
vary: accept-encoding
x-cache: Hit from cloudfront
via: 1.1 51391527dd8c879c45b44b119905c872.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)
x-amz-cf-pop: IAD89-C3
alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400
x-amz-cf-id: efCGFj5rCuk6YSpay3DGd9CSlIhgED7p8cnAoETBXs33lsrpKHyO7Q==
age: 190
vary: Origin

Headers received when response is bogus (Safari):

Age: 11950
Alt-Svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400
Cache-Control: public, max-age=22599
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: application/json;charset=utf-8
Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2024 13:56:13 GMT
ETag: W/"ecca7ceeb42118ed13ab3ab618e56132"
Server: openresty
Vary: Accept-Encoding,accept-encoding, Origin
Via: 1.1 6d137176634825df2648120ac1bcc782.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)
x-amz-cf-id: MT6ErA0YnaUsrgpzA0RAEVx-Yh6sqJy8qL-MWuQeyZvlugS4yZ8szA==
x-amz-cf-pop: JFK52-P1
x-cache: Hit from cloudfront
x-memc: HIT
x-memc-age: 334
x-memc-expires: 22599
x-memc-key: 1f94dcb1c4defc56b4ca18f012dfbfaa. 

Another failure (Python script):

Content-Type: application/json;charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2024 13:56:13 GMT
Server: openresty
Cache-Control: public, max-age=22599
x-memc: HIT
x-memc-key: 1f94dcb1c4defc56b4ca18f012dfbfaa
x-memc-age: 334
x-memc-expires: 22599
ETag: W/"ecca7ceeb42118ed13ab3ab618e56132"
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding,accept-encoding, Origin
X-Cache: Hit from cloudfront
Via: 1.1 f5b6caeff9422ffe5c739ff6cf167922.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)
X-Amz-Cf-Pop: JFK52-P1
Alt-Svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400
X-Amz-Cf-Id: Q_3WfPGDcJVyaKI6Hoe6kswQRxWPcwZpI56K-K1gh1I-pM_ro3kbTQ==
Age: 16516

I'm also getting strange results from time to time, from all points (/movie/, /tv/ ...)

Eg, url https://api.themoviedb.org/3/person/1615007?api_key=APIKEY&append_to_response=images,external_ids give me:

{
  "id": 23220,
  "keywords": [
    {
      "id": 970,
      "name": "parent child relationship"
    },
    {
      "id": 6271,
      "name": "boarding school"
    },
    {
      "id": 3133,
      "name": "vampire"
    },
    {
      "id": 3098,
      "name": "castle"
    },
    {
      "id": 9259,
      "name": "vampire hunter (slayer)"
    },
    {
      "id": 15032,
      "name": "gothic horror"
    },
    {
      "id": 154842,
      "name": "school teacher"
    },
    {
      "id": 162729,
      "name": "van helsing"
    },
    {
      "id": 185407,
      "name": "vampirism"
    },
    {
      "id": 207928,
      "name": "19th century"
    }
  ],
  "external_ids": {
    "freebase_mid": null,
    "freebase_id": null,
    "imdb_id": "nm1627605",
    "tvrage_id": null,
    "wikidata_id": null,
    "facebook_id": null,
    "instagram_id": null,
    "tiktok_id": null,
    "twitter_id": null,
    "youtube_id": null
  },
  "images": {
    "adult": false,
    "also_known_as": [
      "袁偉豪",
      "Yuen Wai Ho",
      "Wai-Ho Yuen",
      "袁伟豪",
      "Benjamin Yuen"
    ],
    "biography": "",
    "birthday": null,
    "deathday": null,
    "gender": 2,
    "homepage": null,
    "imdb_id": "nm1627605",
    "known_for_department": "Acting",
    "name": "Benjamin Yuen Wai-Ho",
    "place_of_birth": null,
    "popularity": 7.655,
    "profile_path": "/f4bmMDrtsrPiI9mxnZBlQdXx1SX.jpg"
  }
}

keywords should not be here. If i remove external_ids from url, the result is correct, but without ... the needed external ids ! 😅