How to Fix "Rate Limit Exceeded" on Twitter

Hitting the "Rate limit exceeded" message on X (formerly Twitter) can be incredibly frustrating, especially when you're in the middle of a campaign or an important conversation. This article breaks down exactly what that error means, why it happens, and provides clear, actionable steps to fix it and prevent it from happening again.

What Exactly Is a Twitter Rate Limit?

In simple terms, a rate limit is a cap on the number of times you (or an app you've connected) can perform a certain action within a specific timeframe. X doesn't have unlimited resources, its servers can only handle so much traffic at once. These limits are a protective measure put in place for a few important reasons:

• To ensure platform stability: By controlling the flow of traffic, X prevents its servers from getting overloaded. This keeps the platform fast and responsive for everyone, even during peak times.
• To reduce spam and malicious activity: Without limits, spam bots could follow tens of thousands of accounts a day, send countless junk DMs, or post non-stop, ruining the user experience. Rate limits make this kind of automated abuse much more difficult to scale.
• To encourage healthy platform use: Limits on actions like following and unfollowing discourage aggressive "churn" tactics and push users toward building more genuine connections.

Think of it like a bar with only one bartender. If 50 people order a custom cocktail at the exact same moment, the bartender will get overwhelmed, and service will grind to a halt. But if those orders are spaced out, everything runs smoothly. Rate limits are X's way of managing the queue so the system doesn't crash.

Common Actions That Have Rate Limits

It's not just one single limit. X applies different caps to various actions, and these numbers can and do change over time based on platform policy. While official numbers are sometimes updated in the developer documentation, here are the well-known categories of limits you might encounter:

• Posting: There's a limit on how many posts you can make per day (historically around 2,400), which is then broken down into smaller, half-hour intervals. You're far more likely to hit a 30-minute limit than the daily one.
• Direct Messages (DMs): A daily limit exists on how many DMs you can send to other accounts (around 500 per day).
• Following: This is one of the most common limits users hit. X currently allows you to follow up to 400 accounts per day. There are also more aggressive limits on accounts that are rapidly following and unfollowing.
• Likes &, Retweets: While a bit higher, limits also exist for how many posts you can like or engage with in a day to prevent spam activity.
• API Requests: This is the big one for marketers and power users. Most third-party tools (schedulers, analytics dashboards, client management apps) connect to your X account through its API. Every action these tools perform on your behalf - pulling analytics, sending a post, checking for new DMs - counts as an API "call." These calls are often limited within a tight 15-minute window, and hitting this limit is a very common cause of the "Rate Limit Exceeded" error for users of social media tools.
• An honorable mention goes to the recently implemented viewing limit, which was an unusual and temporary measure to combat data scraping. While disruptive, the standard action-based limits have been a core part of the platform's infrastructure for years.

Immediate Fixes When You See "Rate Limit Exceeded"

You're locked out and need to get back in. What do you do right now? Here are the most effective steps to take in the moment.

1. Stop Everything and Wait

This is often the simplest and best solution. Most rate limits are tied to a short time window - typically 15 minutes or an hour. Trying to force more actions through will only reset the timer or make the problem worse. Close the tab, put your phone down, and grab a coffee. When you come back in 15-30 minutes, there's a good chance your access will have been restored.

2. Review Your Recent Activity

Did you just go on a following spree? Engage in a rapid-fire conversation with dozens of replies? Or schedule 50 posts at once through a tool? Your immediate behavior is almost certainly the cause. Identifying what you were doing right before the message appeared is the first step to knowing how to avoid it next time. Burst activity - doing a lot of the same thing in a very short period - is the number one trigger for rate limits.

3. Audit Your Connected Third-Party Apps

Sometimes, the "rate limit" isn't even your fault - it's an app you connected months ago quietly hammering the API in the background. Many older or poorly designed apps can make an excessive number of API calls without you even knowing it.

Here’s how you can check and clean them out:

1. On the X website, go to More (...) ->,, Settings and privacy.
2. Navigate to Security and account access ->,, Apps and sessions.
3. Click on Connected apps.

You’ll see a list of every single application that has access to your X account. Go through it carefully. Do you still use all of them? If you see an app you don't recognize or haven't used in a long time, click on it and select "Revoke app permissions." Cleaning this list out can often solve mysterious rate limit issues immediately.

4. Try Switching Networks (A Temporary Workaround)

On rare occasions, rate limits might be tied to your IP address - especially if X detects spammy behavior coming from your network. If the issue is urgent, you can try switching from your Wi-Fi to your phone's cellular data (or vice versa). This is not a long-term fix and won't solve account-specific limits (like tweet or follow limits), but it can sometimes get you around an IP-based block in a pinch.

Proactive Strategies to Avoid Hitting Rate Limits in the Future

Fixing the problem once is good, but preventing it from happening again is better. As a marketer or brand builder, consistent activity is essential. Here's how you can stay active without getting locked out.

Strategy 1: Embrace Smart Scheduling

One of the biggest benefits of using a social media management tool is its ability to space out your content. Instead of manually posting five updates in a two-minute window, you can schedule them to go out at intervals throughout the day.

A good, modern scheduler doesn't just push content out, it communicates properly with X's API, respects the limits, and queues posts intelligently. This avoids the "burst" activity that flags your account. By planning your content on a calendar and letting a tool handle the timing, you can maintain a consistent presence without ever seeing that dreaded rate limit error.

Strategy 2: Space Out Your Engagement Activity

The same logic for posts applies to your manual engagement. If part of your growth strategy involves following new accounts, don't try to follow 400 people on your lunch break. Instead, break it up:

• Follow 50 accounts in the morning.
• Reply to 20 people in the afternoon.
• Like and retweet interesting content throughout the day.

This mimics more natural, human behavior and keeps you well under the limits for any given time window. The key is accuracy over intensity.

Strategy 3: Focus on Quality Over Sheer Volume

This is not just good advice for avoiding rate limits, it's a better social media strategy overall. Instead of sending 500 identical DMs that border on spam, identify 10 high-value account owners and send them personalized, thoughtful messages. Instead of using a follow-bot to mindlessly add thousands, manually follow 50 accounts in your niche that are genuinely a good fit for your brand.

High-quality engagement drives better results and requires far fewer actions, neatly sidestepping the platform's limits. Let the bots get flagged while you build real connections.

Strategy 4: For Developers - Heed the Headers

If you're building a tool that interacts with the X API, this one's for you. The API doesn't just throw you into a penalty box without warning. Every response from the API includes headers that tell you your current rate limit status.

Specifically, look for these in the HTTP response headers:

• x-rate-limit-limit: The total number of requests allowed in the current time window.
• x-rate-limit-remaining: How many requests you have left.
• x-rate-limit-reset: The UTC epoch timestamp for when the limit window resets.

A well-behaved application will check these headers and slow down or pause its requests when x-rate-limit-remaining gets low, only resuming after the x-rate-limit-reset time has passed. This is how professional-grade tools avoid getting their users locked out.

Final Thoughts

Running into the "Rate Limit Exceeded" message is a frustrating but standard part of using X, designed to keep the platform stable and spam-free. Overcoming it simply requires understanding that the platform rewards spaced-out, authentic activity over high-volume, robotic bursts. By waiting it out, cleaning up your connected apps, and being more intentional with how you post and engage, you can easily stay on the right side of these limits.

We know that managing activity across multiple platforms while keeping track of all these rules can be a real challenge, taking time away from actually growing your brand. This is one of the main reasons we built Postbase. Our platform is engineered to interact with social APIs intelligently, so you can use our visual calendar to plan your entire content strategy weeks in advance and trust that everything will be published reliably and at the right cadence. We handle respecting the platform limits, so you can focus on what matters: creating amazing content.