420 Method Failure or Enhance your calm

The 420 HTTP response status code is unofficial client error.

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Introduction
In Action
Sample
Conclusion

Introduction

The HTTP response status code 420 Method Failure and 420 Enhance your calm are unofficial client errors with different meanings based on their origin. When returned by the Spring Framework, it indicates a method failure.

However, if sent by Twitter, it suggests that the client is making too many requests and is being rate-limited to enhance overall platform performance.

In Action

In the earlier version 1.0 of the Twitter API, the 420 Enhance your calm error message was used to inform clients that they were making too many requests, and their rate was limited to manage traffic.

However, with the release of Standard v1.1 of the Twitter API, this status has been replaced by the official message 429 Too Many Requests. On the other hand, the 420 Method Failure error message, sent by the Spring Framework, indicated that a method had failed. Nevertheless, Spring has deprecated this status code and it is no longer in use.

Please note that search engines like Google will not index URLs with 420 Method Failure or 420 Enhance your calm response status, resulting in the removal of indexed URLs returning these HTTP status codes.

Conclusion

The HTTP status code 420, also known as “Enhance your calm,” was informally used by Twitter in the past to indicate that the client was making too many requests and was being rate-limited.

However, this status has been deprecated by Twitter, and they now use the official status code 429 “Too Many Requests” for the same purpose. As a result, you won’t commonly encounter the 420 status code in current implementations.