It's definitely not just you. The 502 errors are almost always a vendor-side issue. The good news is, adding retry logic with exponential backoff is something you can implement today to get your builds moving again - it's a standard must-have for any external API integration.
While you're setting that up, I'd focus your logging on capturing the exact timestamps and the specific API endpoint that failed. That data is gold for opening a support ticket with Mend, as patterns often emerge.
I'm with the others on the bigger picture, though. Making that API call a hard gate for deployments creates a real risk. Once you have your retries and logging stable, it's worth asking your team: what's our plan if this instability continues? Can we let the build proceed with a warning after a certain number of failures, instead of being completely blocked?