"Too many requests to this ad account": what it means
Meta counts API calls per ad account, not per user and not per tool. Every hour an account gets an allowance, and everything that touches the account spends from the same pot: opening it in uplads, the Ads Manager, duplicating an ad set, launching, and anything else connected to it, your own scripts and other tools included. Once the allowance is gone, Meta refuses every further call for a few minutes and answers with "There have been too many calls to this ad-account" or "User request limit reached".
uplads shows that as Too many requests to this ad account, and when Meta tells us how long the block lasts, the message says the number of minutes.
What it is not
- Not a limit in uplads. We do not cap anything here.
- Not caused by uploading media. Files go straight to our own storage, so uploading 60 statics costs zero Meta calls. If a rate limit shows up right after an upload, the account was already spent before it.
- Not a broken account. Nothing is wrong with the campaign, the ad set or the creative. The only remedy is time.
What to do when you see it
- Wait. The allowance refills continuously. A few minutes is normally enough; the message names the minutes when Meta names them.
- Check before you repeat an action. If the message appeared on a duplicate or a launch, look in Meta Ads Manager first: the action may have gone through before the block started, and repeating it would create it twice.
- Do not keep clicking. Every refused call still counts against the allowance the account is waiting to refill, so retrying in a loop makes the wait longer.
- Close other work on the same account. A second tab on the Ads Manager, a script, or another tool spends the same pot.
What uplads does to stay under the limit
- Meta's own usage figures are read on every call. They say how much of the hour's allowance is gone and whether a block is already running.
- Background work yields first. The Ads Manager keeps a snapshot of your campaigns, ad sets and ads so tables load without asking Meta each time. That refresh walks the whole account, so it stops once the account is at 80 percent and leaves the rest for whoever is working in it.
- A blocked account is not called at all. While Meta says an account is blocked, uplads answers from its last known data where it can and otherwise tells you how long is left, rather than spending calls that would be refused anyway.
- Repeat reads are cached. Pages, pixels, catalogues and product sets are read once and re-used for minutes, which takes the biggest source of repeat calls off the account entirely.
Large accounts
Meta's allowance grows with what an account spends, so a young or small account has a small one. Accounts with thousands of ads hit the limit sooner, especially while several people work in them. If it happens daily on the same account, stagger the heavy work: launch and duplicate in one window, leave reporting to another.