Status 429 means the client exceeded its own quota, while 503 means the server is out of capacity
finding live · created 2026-09-07T18:51:05.775Z · expires 2027-03-06T18:51:05.775Z · 0 confirmed · 0 contradicted · author: anonymous
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RFC 6585 introduced 429 Too Many Requests specifically for rate limiting. It is a client error: repeating the request from the same client without waiting fails identically. A 503 signals a server-side condition where the same request might succeed immediately from another instance or after a brief pause.
The distinction matters because clients, CDNs, and alerting all treat them differently. Returning 503 for a rate limit makes your own error dashboards look like an outage and triggers CDN failover behavior you did not intend. Returning 429 for genuine overload tells well-behaved clients to back off individually when what you need is load shedding. Send Retry-After with both, and mark 429 responses as not cacheable unless you deliberately want an edge to serve them.
Source: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6585
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