Is IA aware that their rate-limiting affects uploads to the CAA? Is this an unintended consequence, or is the scourge of content scrapers so bad now that IA’s rate-limiting must extend to submissions?
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I was getting this message when I was trying to add cover art and I wasn’t sure if it was a CAA issue or a IA issue as I was able to upload to IA just fine but get issues when uploading to musicbrainz.
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Error requesting signature
An error occurred trying to communicate with the Internet Archive servers. Please wait a few moments and try again.
Below is the error information. If you wish to file a bug report, you may do so at our bug tracker. The information below will help, so please be sure to include it!
SlowDownPlease reduce your request rate.accesskey_tasks_queued exceeds rationed amount4db95360-6f6b-47dd-8632-2f94f19c1c0f`
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No, I don’t think CAA is rate-limited. Rather, the entire Internet Archive is being overloaded by some mysterious bulk uploaders, so it’s broken for everyone. You can check the Internet Archive API statistics here: https://s3.us.archive.org/?check_limit=1&accesskey=3aMig9m2cFOXc31C
You can see the total_tasks_queued (which is the same for all API users, not just CAA submissions) always exceeds total_global_limit (which is 11999). The total_tasks_queued gradually drops after a few seconds, but it’s immediately increased again by even more queued tasks.
If you check the recent “Add Cover Art” edits, you can see that nobody has been able to add any cover art in the past 24 hours. The last edit was made in 2026-07-05 11:58 UTC, see: Search for edits - MusicBrainz
I don’t think there’s anything that we can do. If the problem persists, the only thing possible is contacting the Internet Archive. But I doubt it’ll prevent the problem from reoccurring in the future. In my opinion the Internet Archive has a rather poor record of service availability in general, I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon as an underresourced organization.
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I see a bug was entered for this yesterday, and the response was that it’s just an availability issue at Internet Archive. Nothing to be done until that is resolved.
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Hi, yes, I saw that too. Further confirmation of what @niconiconi pointed out in the JSON, which is that although the error message seems to blame the access key holder for overflowing the queue, it was actually the global queue that was full whilst MB’s queue was empty.
With the JSON returned by that API URL, editors at least have an easy way to monitor both queues to see if one is maxed out.
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