A brand-new portal comes up instead of waiting for an image it never had

A portal created for the first time could stay unreachable for hours — its address answered 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable while, behind it, the portal itself was running and healthy.

The check behind it is a good one. Before a running portal accepts an update, it rebuilds the page types stored in it; if a type that used to build stops building, the update is refused and the previous version keeps serving. That is what stops a bad update from taking a working portal down.

On the very first start there is no previous version. Nothing has ever been built, so every type is new — and a type that fails its first build was being read as one the new version had broken. The portal refused to take itself into service to protect an older self that never existed, and nothing else was there to answer, so visitors got the 503.

A first start is now recognised for what it is. When nothing on the portal has ever been built, a build failure is reported rather than treated as damage, and the portal serves. The moment anything has been built there, the check goes back to its full strictness — an established portal still refuses an update that breaks a page type that used to work.

Failures on a first start are no longer silent either. They are named in the portal's own health report, so a page that cannot be built yet — usually one whose feature is still being installed — shows up as something to look at rather than as an address that does not answer.

Nothing to do; this applies to every newly created portal.