Dev iconDevSep 4, 2026 ~1 min source read

Handle Telegram Bot API Rate Limits in PHP: 429, Retry-After, Outbound Queues, and Grouping

Hit them and you get HTTP 429 Too Many Requests with a Retry-After in seconds, or worse, silent drops during broadcasts. A small outbound queue that serializes sends per chat and globally throttles.

Handle Telegram Bot API Rate Limits in PHP: 429, Retry-After, Outbound Queues, and Grouping
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Useful takeaways from this story.

Hit them and you get HTTP 429 Too Many Requests with a Retry-After in seconds, or worse, silent drops during broadcasts.

A small outbound queue that serializes sends per chat and globally throttles.

Common breakage during mass mailings (same text, fan-out, duplicate sends).

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The useful part

Hit them and you get HTTP 429 Too Many Requests with a Retry-After in seconds, or worse, silent drops during broadcasts. A small outbound queue that serializes sends per chat and globally throttles. Common breakage during mass mailings (same text, fan-out, duplicate sends).

How it works

  • It is a working PHP pattern you can drop into a webhook handler.
  • Limits you must respect Telegram publishes these in the official docs and they are the source of truth: ~1 message per second per chat to the same chat, and ~20 messages per minute to the same group.
  • If you ignore these, Telegram will throttle you, your queue will grow, and your broadcast will look broken.

Example or evidence

  • What we build Telegram's Bot API applies per-chat and per-method limits.

Details worth keeping

Parsing 429 and Retry-After correctly in PHP cURL. Grouping bursts into a single chat to avoid the 1 msg/sec/chat ceiling. ~30 messages per second globally per bot, with short bursts allowed.

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