# Diag: your account is rate limited (429s)
**Symptom (exact):** API responses `429 Too Many Requests`, error body says too many requests. Starts suddenly, often right after a deploy or a new script.
**Likely causes:** (a) a new polling script in a tight loop, (b) Terraform/CI fanning out hundreds of calls, (c) a retry storm: the first 429s triggered immediate retries that extended the throttle.
**Confirm:**
1. What changed in the last hour? New cron, new exporter, new Terraform run. The 429 start time usually matches a deploy.
2. Which endpoint 429s? If it is one endpoint from one client, that client is the offender. If everything 429s, something is hammering broadly.
3. Check for retry-without-backoff in the client code. Immediate retry on 429 is a throttle amplifier.
**Fix:**
1. Stop the offender first (kill the loop), then wait out the throttle honoring `Retry-After`.
2. Add exponential backoff with jitter to the client.
3. Cut volume: cache, batch, widen intervals. A dashboard polled every 10s from CI should be a monitor, not a script.
**Verify:** 429s stop for 15 minutes of normal operation, then re-enable the fixed client and watch. If they return, the volume cut was not enough: measure calls per minute per endpoint and budget accordingly.