You were checking for appointments and the site stopped showing you a calendar. Now it shows a message with a number in brackets, and the obvious next move — try a different network, try your phone, try a VPN — may be exactly right or completely pointless.
Which one depends on a distinction the messages themselves do not make clear.
Account, or connection?
Every restriction in this system attaches to one of two things.
Your account. The limit follows your login. New network, new browser, new device, incognito window — none of it helps, because none of it changes who is logged in. Codes: 429201, 429202, 429001.
Your connection. The limit attaches to the address you are coming from. Your login is fine. Changing network is the correct move and often the whole fix. Codes: 403201, 403102.
And a third group that is not a restriction at all, though it reads like one: 403206 and 401 usually mean your session expired. Sign in again.
Why you cannot read these by their prefix
This is the mistake that costs people evenings.
The numbers look like they group by their first three digits — all the 403s together, all the 429s together. They do not.
- 403201 and 403102 restrict the connection. 403203 shows similar wording and behaves differently.
- 429201 is a temporary pause on the account, typically measured in hours, and it lifts by itself.
- 429202 is an account lock that does not lift by itself.
So “I got a 429 yesterday and waiting fixed it” tells you nothing about the 429 you have today. The specific number matters, and we have written up each one separately — what it means, what it attaches to, how long it lasts, and what makes it worse.
What to do, in order
1. Write the number down. Before you reload anything. The message often does not come back in the same form, and without the number you are guessing.
2. Decide which kind it is. Account or connection, from the lists above.
3. If it is the connection: switch networks — mobile data instead of home broadband is the easiest test. If the calendar comes back, that was it.
4. If it is the account: stop. Not “slow down” — stop. Continuing to try is what turns a two-hour pause into something that does not lift on its own. Wait it out, then come back at a normal pace.
5. If it is a session expiry: sign in again. That is genuinely all.
6. If nothing works after the stated window: contact VFS support with the code and the timestamp. This is slow and it is the correct route. There is no back channel, and anyone selling you one is selling you something else.
What makes it worse
Refreshing through a restriction. The limits are cumulative in effect. A temporary pause that would have cleared in a couple of hours becomes something longer when you spend those hours hitting the same endpoint.
Registering a second account. This is the most damaging move on the list and it is the most common. Duplicate accounts for the same applicant are precisely what the anti-abuse rules exist to catch, and the usual result is that you lose both — the new one and the one holding your existing application.
Cycling VPN exits. Under a connection-level block a single clean network change is reasonable. Rotating through exit addresses looks, from the far side, exactly like the abuse pattern being defended against, and it tends to widen rather than clear the block.
Assuming it is personal. These are automated thresholds. Nobody reviewed your case and decided you were suspicious. That also means there is nobody to appeal to in the moment.
Preventing the next one
The uncomfortable truth is that most of these restrictions are self-inflicted, and not through carelessness — through effort. People hit them because they are trying hard, refreshing at intervals a human can sustain, on a route where appointments open once in roughly a thousand checks.
The effort is rational and the tool is wrong. Checking by hand cannot cover a window measured in minutes, but it can absolutely cover the rate limit.
So: check at a human pace, or hand the watching to something built to do it within what the system tolerates. Those are the two workable options. The third — checking at machine frequency by hand — is the one that produces the code in your browser.
What we do
We watch continuously, at a rate the booking system tolerates, and book the moment an appointment appears. You pay after it is confirmed.
If you are locked out right now, the first thing to do is identify your code. The full list is here, with what each one attaches to and how long it typically lasts.