As part of Atlassian’s ongoing commitment to reliability, performance, and fair usage, burst API rate limits are now introduced for all Jira Cloud customers. These limits, first announced in the change-log in August 2025, are designed to prevent service disruptions caused by sudden spikes and sustained high load to API traffic. By proactively managing high-volume requests, we help ensure a stable and seamless experience for all customers.
What does this mean for you?
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If your app exceeds the allowed number of API requests in a short period, you will receive a “429: Too Many Requests” error.
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These limits are enforced on a per-tenant and per-API basis.
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Rate limits are enforced using industry-standard token bucket algorithms, allowing for short bursts of activity but maintaining a sustainable average rate over time.
What action is required?
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Review and update your apps and integrations to ensure compliance with the new burst rate limits.
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Implement robust error handling, including exponential backoff and retry logic, to gracefully manage 429 responses.
Why is this important?
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These limits are based on industry best practices and are essential for maintaining a reliable and high-performing Jira Cloud platform for all users and partners.
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Adhering to these limits helps prevent service disruptions and ensures a positive experience for your customers.
Need help or more information?
Thank you for your cooperation in adopting these changes. Respecting burst limits is critical to delivering a seamless Jira Cloud experience for all customers.
Thank you for sharing some details about changes to the rate limits, @Prashanth_M. I have two requests:
- Please share more details how the burst rate limits work
- How should we test our apps?
More details about burst rate limits
Since rate limiting is quite an essential factor for our app (and I believe many others), I’d appreciate some more details how the burst rate limiting mechanism works.
I have read your post, the changelog, and the documentation and I think I understood the different buckets (or Cost Budgets as called in the docs). However the explanation about the burst api rate limiting is quite vague:
Quota and burst rate limiting is implemented as a set of rules that consider the app sending the request, the tenant receiving that request, the number of requests, the edition of the product being queried, and its number of users.
The rules are applied independently to burst (per 1 second) and quota (per 1 hour) periods to determine an appropriate maximum amount of requests. Request processing above the threshold is blocked, including downstream processing.
To name a good example, there are the docs about rate limiting in Jira DC. There it’s clearly explained that we have a bucket per user with X requests in a certain time interval. If they don’t use it, it accumulates until a certain threshold.
Testing
The rate limit docs state for a long time already that we shouldn’t perform rate limit testing against Atlassian Cloud tenants. Can you please tell me how we should implement a robust rate limit mechanism without testing it?
We have rate limiting mechanisms already implemented and I want to ensure they also work properly in the future. I want to make sure that we build a reliable ecosystem together where apps and the base product can excel with a good performance without getting overloaded.
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Hi @Prashanth_M,
could you kindly provide an update on https://ecosystem.atlassian.net/browse/FRGE-1923?
I understand that Atlassian needs to have control over the amount of traffic it receives, but it is imperative that consumers can meaningfully respond to such situations.
8 Likes
Just a note that we have multiple large customers on DC that can not move to Cloud because Atlassian Cloud has API throughput limits that are 3 or more orders of magnitude fewer RPS than their on premise system.
4 Likes
@Prashanth_M any news on the matter? Thank you.
@Prashanth_M, friendly reminder that the Ecosystem is waiting on an update regarding https://ecosystem.atlassian.net/browse/FRGE-1923. Can you please have someone provide an update on this?
3 Likes