# When Azure DevOps rate-limits you

Azure DevOps meters each user against a consumption budget over a rolling
five-minute window, and a busy morning can push you over it: a large
cross-project board open in several tabs, an export you are running, or a
script or pipeline that runs with your own access token. When that happens the
board says so, pauses, and comes back on its own instead of going blank and
looking broken.

## Steps

1. Look at the top of the board for the warning card: *"Updates are paused because Azure DevOps is temporarily
   limiting requests. Wait until … for refreshing to resume."*.
2. Note the time it names. That is when the board expects the service to accept
   traffic again; the message removes itself within a second of the pause
   lapsing.
3. Carry on moving cards. A drag made during the pause is not thrown away. The
   write waits out the window and goes through when it reopens. One kind of
   reorder is the exception: when the cards around the drop have no room left
   between their ranks, the board has to read that stretch first, and it cannot
   while the pause lasts. The card keeps its order, the message says to try the
   move again, and once the pause is over the same move works (see
   [Put a column in priority order](https://anykanban.com/docs/move-work/order-a-column-by-priority/)).
4. Avoid pressing **Refresh** while the warning is showing. Refresh reloads the
   whole board, so the cards and columns are replaced by a loading indicator
   until the pause ends, and it does not shorten the pause. The reload waits
   and tries again a few times; if the service is still refusing by then, the
   board keeps retrying on its own and appears when requests are accepted again.
5. If the board was still opening when the limit hit, read the error instead:
   *"Azure DevOps is limiting requests from this account. AnyKanban will keep
   retrying, and the board will load when requests are accepted again."* There
   is nothing to press: the board re-attempts the load on its own and appears
   when the window reopens.
6. If the warning keeps returning, reduce what is open. Every tab showing a
   board re-runs its query on its own timer: every 20 seconds while the tab is
   in front, and every two minutes while it sits in the background. Each tab
   also loads the whole board when it opens, and checks again as soon as you
   switch back to it. Boards showing side by side in separate windows cost the
   most, because each one refreshes every 20 seconds.

## What you should see

One discreet warning card at the top of the board, not a message per refused
call. Unless you press **Refresh**, nothing disappears while it is showing: the
cards, the columns and the counts stay exactly as they were, they simply stop
updating. Background
refreshes are skipped rather than queued, so when the window reopens the board
takes one ordinary refresh instead of firing every cycle it missed.

Your own work still lands. A card you drag during the pause moves on screen at
once, its write waits, and the revision check still protects it when it
resumes, so a resumed write cannot overwrite a change someone else made in the
meantime.

## Notes

While the pause is on, columns your process rules would reject may stop dimming
as you drag: that dimming comes from a check that is itself a read, and reads
are skipped. The drop is still attempted and the server still refuses it, with
its own message. You lose the warning, not the protection.

How long the pause lasts is the service's decision, taken from the `Retry-After`
value it sends. That header is frequently not visible to code running inside an
extension frame, in which case the board waits five seconds and doubles that for
each further pause it has to guess at. A single pause never exceeds five minutes.

## Related

- [Keep the board open during your daily meeting](https://anykanban.com/docs/work-with-others/keep-the-board-open/)
- [Two people move the same card](https://anykanban.com/docs/work-with-others/two-people-one-card/)
- [Technical Documentation](https://anykanban.com/docs/technical-documentation/)