Rate-limit message (429)

Also called: 429 Too Many Requests, too many requests message, rate limit error, cooldown message.

What the user sees when the server says "too many requests, slow down" (HTTP status 429). A good one says in plain words how long to wait, often with a countdown taken from the Retry-After header.

The server allows 3 codes every 15 s. Tap “Resend code” 4 times: the 4th gets 429 Too Many Requests with Retry-After. The friendly message turns that into plain words and a countdown.

Ready

Say it in a prompt

When POST /login/code/resend returns 429, read the Retry-After header and show "Too many codes asked for. You can ask for a new one in 30 s." under the button. Disable "Resend code" with a live countdown, and enable it again when the countdown reaches 0.

Seen on

GitHub REST API: Over the limit it answers 403 or 429, with retry-after or x-ratelimit-reset saying when you may try again.
Stripe API: Rate-limited requests get 429 Too Many Requests and a Stripe-Rate-Limited-Reason header that says which limit was hit.

You might describe it as

too many attempts, try again in 30 seconds
error when I click resend too many times
countdown before I can ask for another code

Not to be confused with

Retry with backoff
A rate-limit message tells the person how long to wait; retry with backoff is code that waits and tries again on its own.