SOL (Solihull) scraper failing — connection refused / server returning 503

[symroe]

Error (2026-06-24)

Connection refused on democracy endpoint

Investigation

https://democracy.solihull.gov.uk/mgWebService.asmx/GetCouncillorsByWard is currently returning HTTP 503 Service Unavailable. The server is reachable at the TCP/TLS level but returning 503 — suggesting a server-side outage or maintenance window.

The scraper has no special configuration (pass in councillors.py).

Fix patterns ruled out

1. HTTPS migration — already HTTPS
2. verify_requests = False — server responds to TLS; not a cert issue
3. http_lib = "playwright" — 503 from the application layer; changing the HTTP client won't help if the backend is down
4. URL changes — no evidence the URL has changed

What needs to happen

Check whether democracy.solihull.gov.uk is temporarily down. If this persists over multiple days, investigate whether:

• Lambda's IP range is being periodically blocked (in which case http_lib = "playwright" with its Chromium fingerprint may help)
• The server has been decommissioned and Solihull has moved to a new CMS or ModGov host