Wayfair
Retail
Rate limits with a straightforward 429 from Cloudflare, which is one of the few responses here that actually clears if you wait.
Wayfair returns a plain 429 from Cloudflare. Compared with most entries in this glossary, this is refreshingly honest: the status code means what the specification says it means, and the correct response is the textbook one.
It is worth including precisely because it is ordinary. Not every refusal is a sophisticated bot verdict, and treating a genuine rate limit as though it were an unbeatable fingerprinting problem leads people to rebuild their entire client when they simply needed to slow down.
What is in front of it
- Cloudflare: Serves challenges and blocks on 403, rate limits on 429, and puts its own four-digit error code in the body rather than on the status line.
- Cloudflare, with rate limiting rules applied at the edge.
Status codes
429 Rate limited
Rate limited. Observed behaviour.
A Cloudflare rate limiting rule was exceeded for this source.
What triggers it
- Request rate above the configured threshold.
- Shared address space consuming the same budget.
How to confirm it
- server: cloudflare, sometimes with retry-after and a 1015 code in the body.
What to do about it
- Honour Retry-After if present, otherwise back off exponentially with jitter.
- Reduce concurrency first. Rate limits usually trip on burst shape rather than on totals.
Notes
- Diagnose the simple explanation before the complicated one. A 429 that clears after a pause was a rate limit.