Announcing the API rate limit for Offset-based Pagination in article attachment API

Announced on	Rollout starts
October 4, 2021	November 15, 2021

Zendesk is supporting a new API pagination model called cursor-based pagination. It allows much faster response times than offset-based pagination at any page depth and improves the overall performance and reliability of Zendesk APIs.

This announcement answers the following questions:

• What’s changing and why?
• How will this affect me?
• What do I need to do?

What’s changing and why?

We are introducing limits on offset-based pagination for requests greater than 100 records per page. This change protects the Zendesk infrastructure, ensures reliability, and encourages a shift to cursor-based pagination. It also enables Zendesk to improve the performance of this endpoint for articles with many attachments. 

The limit is set to 100 because most accounts perform pagination queries that access fewer than 100 attachments per page. 

How will this affect me?

If your requests exceed 100 records per page, then you’ll see a HTTP 429 response code that you’ve gone beyond the number of allotted requests for that timeframe, and your remaining requests must be retried later. Zendesk provides a retry-after value in the response header, indicating the wait time before retrying the remaining requests.

Offset-based pagination requests for fewer than 100 attachments are not affected, nor are requests made using cursor-based pagination. Moreover, this change neither impacts nor restricts your access to any of the existing and future data in your account.

What do I need to do?

To avoid experiencing rate limits on article attachment requests, we recommend using cursor pagination instead of offset pagination where possible (see Introducing Pagination Changes - Zendesk API). If your account will likely be affected by the change in available results, we have already sent you both an email and a follow-up email. 

We recommend that you consider the following:

• If you are using any third-party integrations or apps, you should inform the respective software partners about this change. 
• You should also share this information with your developers and any 3rd party integration service partners that perform deeper pagination using offset pagination for data archival use cases.  

If you have any questions, please log in to Zendesk Support and submit a ticket.