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Hello :wave: I have gotten a few flows today that have failed when the state of the flow is trying to update. I’ll post the error in the thread

```State message: Flow run encountered an exception. PrefectHTTPStatusError: Server error '503 Service Unavailable' for url '<https://api.prefect.cloud/api/accounts/>&lt;account_id&gt;/workspaces/&lt;workspace&gt;/task_runs/&lt;task_run&gt;/set_state'
Response: {'exception_message': 'Service Unavailable'}```

I left out my account_id, workspace and task run id. It looks like issues with the Prefect api, but I was not sure if this was happening across other accounts

I’ve had this pop up a few more times today again, wanted to see if anyone else was experiencing this

Can you share a few flow run id’s and message me your account/workspace - I’m curious that no one else ahs reported this, but you’re still getting 503's from set_state

Hi John, it looks like there are some invalid characters happening in your code, and it’s failing to write to teh cloud database

```(sqlalchemy.dialects.postgresql.asyncpg.Error) &lt;class 'asyncpg.exceptions.CharacterNotInRepertoireError'&gt;: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x00```


image (21).png

Ohhhh that looks like a duplicate DML from snowflake

The logging in the prefect UI did not show me that so that helps me out a lot

Yea, I think this was a good call out all the same, we are debating if a 503 is the right return here

503 implies a server side error (which it is) but as a result of a bad input which was client input, so it threw me off here

Yep that’s what I thought it was an issue on prefects side, but now that I know it’s on our end I can fix the issue