Does Micro Center not want my money? Either the site is down or I have been blocked for months now

Well, let's see here, as of December 3, 2024

My current experience is this…

ALL links to EVERYTHING (including on the newsletters I receive in my e-mail) result in 502 bad gateway.

I have been in IT for all of my adult life, and I have been using nginx as my primary web server for…. um… so long that I can't remember.

502 bad gateway can be so so so many things. Did you try deploying to a new CDN to reduce load and it failed? I don't remember if you guys are using C# / ASP .Net (I think you are because I once applied to one of your guys' programming roles a while back.) So to me I see this, and I think about that, and I basically am reading this:

1: You are probably (but not necessarily) using IIS and it's failing,
or
2: You are attempting to use ASP .Net Core, which is viable, but still relatively new compared to ASP .Net on IIS.
or
3: nginx is being used as a proxy and it's failing to connect to the internally hosted location (one of the above two)

#3 is a pretty common set up, and I do it quite a bit.

Without logs I see the following possibilities:
Your primary web site server (code) is failing to execute OR is failing to connect to your database and refusing to load. This tells me you don't have a failover option (or somehow you've managed to have ALL of your failovers ALSO fail.

The database is down, the server is failing to load, a number of things.

Every once in a while it seems to load for a few minutes, so the only other thing I can think of right now is one of a few:

A code change failed causing the primary web server deployment to fail, or there's enough traffic that it's actually causing a bottleneck preventing the nginx ←→ web server that actually runs code from communicating

Sometimes when it does load it does stay up then I'm guessing some code on the web site attempts to execute causing another failure because then a 502 just sort of appears without interaction. (I haven't been watching the console though.)

Not sure how your system is actually configured and everything I've said is speculation, but if region relevant to your CDN distribution (assuming you use one), I shop at the Kroger in front of the MicroCenter / PowerSpec corporate office.

Hopefully your guys sysadmins / developers get it figured and stabilized.

I just had this same issue in Chrome. Restarting browser did not fix it. However, I was able to resolve it by doing the following steps:

1. When on the micro center 500 error page, open Chrome Dev tools by pressing F12
2. Go to Application Tab
3. Go to Storage on the left
4. In the main panel, click the button that says Clear Site Data.

I imagine you can also clear your browser's entire cache and that would also fix it, but I didn't want to do that because I would get logged out of every other website I use.

So anyway, I guess for some reason the site session data gets corrupted over time.

Hope this helps.