Your AI APIs Are Returning 429s and Crashing Your Backend. Here’s the Fix

Why wrapping LLM calls in simple retry loops wrecks connection pools under load, and how we engineered an adaptive token-bucket queue at SpaceAI360. It usually happens right after a feature release or an unexpected spike in user concurrency. Your app starts getting traction. Dashboard traffic spikes. And then, without warning, your error logging service lights up like a Christmas tree: 429 Too Many Requests: Rate limit exceeded. Within minutes, user requests freeze, client connections hang for 8