Messenger error 17: User request limit reached

Code 17 is the user-level throttle in the Graph API's rate-limit family: the user whose access token is being used has exhausted their personal call quota for the rolling window. Meta's error-handling guide names it "API User Too Many Calls" and prescribes the family remedy: wait, retry later, and examine your request volume.

On a Messenger bot this code deserves a moment of thought, because a correctly configured bot mostly should not see it. Send API calls run on a Page access token, which is metered by the Page-oriented limits (32, 613, 80006). Error 17 appearing in your logs usually means some part of the system is calling Graph endpoints with a user token instead: admin dashboards fetching Page lists, token-refresh jobs, onboarding flows that enumerate Pages via /me/accounts, or scripts a developer wired up with their personal token that later shipped to production. Those user-token quotas are far smaller than app quotas, so loops hit them quickly.

The Pages API adds a wrinkle: Meta documents that Pages calls made with a user token are subject to platform limits and can return either 17 or 32 depending on the calling context. Either way the immediate handling is the same, back off, and the durable fix is moving the workload onto the right token type.

{
  "error": {
    "message": "(#17) User request limit reached",
    "type": "OAuthException",
    "code": 17,
    "fbtrace_id": "Fz54k3GZrio"
  }
}

Use the least surprising token for each job: Page tokens for messaging, system-user tokens for automation, user tokens only for interactive admin actions. Audit production for personal tokens, they are also a security liability, and add the token type to your API-client logs so a future error 17 identifies its source in one query. The full throttle-code map lives in the Messenger limits reference and in the troubleshooting guide.