A 429 means a rate limit was hit. Something sent more requests in a short time than the server allows. There are two cases. Your own site is showing 429s to visitors, which means a rate-limit or bot rule on your server, hosting or Cloudflare is too strict, or you're under a burst of bot traffic. Or your app is getting 429s from someone else's API, which means you're calling it too often and need to slow down.
What's the problem
Visitors see "429 Too Many Requests", or a feature of your app stops working and its logs show 429s from an outside service such as a payment, email or AI API.
Why it happens
- A bot or scraper is hammering your site and real visitors share its limits.
- Your rate limit is set too low for normal use, for example on a login or search page.
- Your app calls an outside API in a loop, retries too fast, or makes one call per item instead of batching.
- Many visitors share one IP address (an office, a school, a mobile network) and get counted as one.
- You've reached your plan's limit with an API provider.
How to fix it
- Find out who returned the 429: your site, your host, Cloudflare, or an outside API. The response headers and your logs say.
- For your own site, look at what's sending the traffic. If it's bots, block or challenge them. If it's real visitors, raise the limit.
- For outside APIs, respect the
Retry-Afterheader, add waiting between retries, cache results, and batch requests. - Check your plan's limits with the API provider and upgrade if you've outgrown them.
What Preventionlabs checks
One click runs the full report on your domain. For this problem it shows whether your site loads, how fast, and where its redirects go. With Cloudflare connected, it also shows which requests the firewall blocked, by Cloudflare's own rule names; which pages returned server errors (5xx) to visitors, and when.
Run your free reportYour first report is free, no card needed. Then A$50 a month, up to 10 domains. Read-only: it never changes anything.
Sources
- MDN Web Docs: 429 Too Many Requestsreference
The HTTP 429 Too Many Requests client error response status code indicates the client has sent too many requests in a given amount of time.