Change varnish 4 503 error

There are two kinds of errors in Varnish 4. One is backend fetch errors.vcl_backend_error handles this kind of errors. Another is errors generated in VCL. vcl_synth handles this kind of errors.

In your case, you're customizing vcl_error subroutine, that is not for backend errors.

You can distinguish these two kinds of erros from following default.vcl.

vcl 4.0;

backend default {
    .host = "127.0.0.1";
    .port = "8080";
}

sub vcl_recv {
    if (req.url ~ "^/404") {
        return (synth(999, "make 404 error explicitly"));
    }
}

sub vcl_backend_response {
}

sub vcl_deliver {
}

sub vcl_backend_error {
    set beresp.http.Content-Type = "text/html; charset=utf-8";
    synthetic( {"errors due to backend fetch"} );
    return (deliver);
}

sub vcl_synth {
    if (resp.status == 999) {
        set resp.status = 404;
        set resp.http.Content-Type = "text/plain; charset=utf-8";
        synthetic({"errors due to vcl"});
        return (deliver);
    }
    return (deliver);
}

Confirm error messages

$ curl http://localhost:6081/   # If the backend server is not running, "503 Backend fetch failed" error occurs 
errors due to backend fetch
$ curl http://localhost:6081/404/foo
errors due to vcl

I would like to propose an alternative... please find below a sample default.vcl file

vcl 4.0;

import std;

backend default {
    .host = "127.0.0.1";
    .port = "8080";
}

sub vcl_backend_response {
       if (beresp.status == 503 && bereq.retries < 5 ) {
       return(retry);
 }
}

sub vcl_backend_error {
      if (beresp.status == 503 && bereq.retries == 5) {
          synthetic(std.fileread("/etc/varnish/error503.html"));
          return(deliver);
       }
 }

sub vcl_synth {
    if (resp.status == 503) {
        synthetic(std.fileread("/etc/varnish/error503.html"));
        return(deliver);
     }
}

sub vcl_deliver {
    if (resp.status == 503) {
        return(restart);
    }
  }

And then you can save your custom html in error503.html