Announcing API rate limits for Offset-based Pagination

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.

To protect Zendesk infrastructure, ensure reliability, and encourage a shift to cursor-based pagination, beginning September 15, 2021, we are introducing limits on offset-based pagination for requests greater than 1,000 pages depth (and 100,000 resources). Requests made beyond 1,000 pages depth are still allowed, but limited to 10 requests per minute.

If requests exceed that number, you’ll get a HTTP 429 response code that you’ve gone above the number of allotted requests in that timeframe, and the remaining request will need to be retried later. Zendesk provides a “retry-after” value in the response header that indicates the wait time before the request can be retried.

Please note that offset-based pagination requests for fewer than 1,000 pages are not affected, nor requests made using cursor-based pagination. Additionally, this change does not impact or restrict your access to any of the existing and future data in your account.

This change allows Zendesk to improve the performance of these endpoints at deeper pagination levels.  This number was chosen as the vast majority of accounts perform pagination queries that access fewer than 1,000 pages. 

What do I need to do?

To avoid experiencing rate limits on deep pagination requests, we recommend using cursor pagination instead of offset pagination where possible. See Introducing Pagination Changes - Zendesk API for more information.

If you are using any third-party integrations or apps, you should also inform the respective software partners about this change.

Change Date: September 15, 2021

Please share this information with your developers and any 3rd party integration service partners that may perform deeper pagination using offset pagination for data archival use cases.  If your account has been identified as an account that would be affected by the change in available results, you and your team should have already received an email and a follow-up email. If you have any questions, please log in to Zendesk Support and submit a ticket.