Areas broken on all overpass servers?

The issue @EdLoach is facing is pretty much unrelated to the area update issue. In fact his query doesn't even use the word area in there, so there's nothing to worry about. It would have worked all the time.

Now, the reason for the 504 Gateway issue is the way too large timeout value. I'd suggest to reduce that at least down to 3600 seconds or even lower. 24hours timeout is deemed to be a resource killer by Overpass API and the query get immediately canceled.

Here's my log for the same query with 3600 seconds timeout - results returned back in 1 minute 30 seconds.

wget "http://overpass-api.de/api/interpreter?data=[timeout:3600];(rel["boundary"](50.06419,-11.1621,59.04055,2.19727););( ._;way(r););out meta;" -O res.osm
--2015-12-11 17:11:28--  http://overpass-api.de/api/interpreter?data=[timeout:3600];(rel[boundary](50.06419,-11.1621,59.04055,2.19727););(%20._;way(r););out%20meta;
Resolving overpass-api.de (overpass-api.de)... 2a01:4f8:131:6109::2, 46.4.41.83
Connecting to overpass-api.de (overpass-api.de)|2a01:4f8:131:6109::2|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [application/osm3s+xml]
Saving to: 'res.osm'

    [                              <=>                                             ] 326,493,532 28.3MB/s   in 8.3s

2015-12-11 17:12:52 (37.6 MB/s) - 'res.osm' saved [326493532]

NB: The issue on the French server was reported some time back but I don't have an up to date status from @sly. The Russian server is facing some hard disk issues now and then. The issue on the German server was reported back in November, but I also don't have a feedback from Roland, why the update job stopped. Nevertheless, the area creation job was scheduled again on overpass-api.de, so you should get up-to-date areas now.