// WHAT IT MEANS
Two very different things produce this line. If your 5-hour session or weekly allowance is exhausted, the message usually names the window and gives a reset time — that is an allowance limit. If both bars in /usage have room, it is a capacity throttle: Anthropic is shedding load, and your allowance is untouched.
The API-style variants — "429 rate_limit_error", "rate_limit_event", "Overloaded" — are the same capacity case surfacing from a lower layer.
// WHEN IT RESETS
Allowance case: at the reset time in the message (5-hour window) or your fixed weekly time.
Capacity case: usually within a few minutes. Claude Code retries on its own with backoff; if it keeps failing for more than ten minutes, status.anthropic.com will normally show an incident. Anthropic has reset everyone's limits after larger outages — the most recent fleet-wide reset is shown below.
// WHAT TO DO NOW
- 01 Run /usage. Bars have room → capacity throttle, just wait or retry. A bar is full → see the 5-hour or weekly page.
- 02 For a capacity throttle, avoid firing many parallel subagents for a few minutes; each one is a separate request competing for the same capacity.
- 03 If you are on a Max plan and the throttle is model-specific, switching between Opus and Sonnet often gets through.
- 04 Check status.anthropic.com before assuming your account is the problem.
// DOES IT AFFECT MY WEEKLY ALLOWANCE?
A capacity throttle does not spend any allowance — the requests that were rejected did not count. An allowance limit is exactly that; see the weekly-limit page for what refills it.
// ALSO APPEARS AS
- “rate_limit_event”
- “API Error: 429 rate_limit_error”
- “Overloaded”