[BUG] Spectator V5 unexpected Rate Limit

[GXJackJ]

I have been experiencing a high level of unexpected Rate Limiting on Spectator V5 recently.

Since around 12pm CEST on the Friday 10th July my live application has been experiencing bursts of Rate Limiting on the Spectator V5 method ([/lol/spectator/v5/active-games/by-summoner/). These bursts do not match-up with demand, and in fact I am noticing them happening during off-peak times as much as peak.

I did not experience any rate limiting before this started on Friday, and I am now experiencing it frequently in bursts.

My method rate limit for Spectator V5 is double my Application rate limit, and I have many other methods calling successfully during these bursts without any rate limiting. The issue is only happening for this one method. My userbase has remained steady and no changes were made in my infrastructure.

Response attached in case it provides any clarity:

{
    "Date": "Wed, 15 Jul 2026 10:08:37 GMT",
    "Content-Type": "application/json;charset=utf-8",
    "Transfer-Encoding": "chunked",
    "Connection": "keep-alive",
    "Access-Control-Allow-Headers": "User-Agent,X-Requested-With,If-Modified-Since,Cache-Control,Content-Type,Range",
    "Access-Control-Allow-Methods": "GET, PUT, DELETE, POST, OPTIONS",
    "Access-Control-Allow-Origin": "*",
    "Access-Control-Expose-Headers": "Content-Length,Content-Range",
    "set-cookie": X
    "Content-Encoding": "gzip",
    "Retry-After": "28",
    "Vary": "Origin, accept-encoding",
    "X-Rate-Limit-Type": "server",
    "cf-cache-status": "DYNAMIC",
    "Server": "cloudflare",
    "CF-RAY": X
}

The only part that I thought was interesting is the X-Rate-Limit-Type is "server", whereas it used to return either "method", "service", or "application". So, potentially Riot server issues causing unexpected rate limiting?

[dimlin-code]

I also got these rate limits from Friday. Same experience and I don't hit the endpoint limits

[K-Le-Clech]

Same for me.

[Vincouux]

Same for me, but on the /lol/match/v5/matches & /lol/match/v5/matches/by-puuid/, I'm getting:

Retry-After
7

X-Rate-Limit-Type
server

That being said, I can't confirm what other headers are present when this occures as it's extremely hard to reproduce.

This is what I'm getting from a 200 OK request:

X-App-Rate-Limit
500:10,30000:600

X-App-Rate-Limit-Count
2:10,19:600

X-Method-Rate-Limit
2000:10

X-Method-Rate-Limit-Count
2:10

Which exactly match what is advertised in my dev platform.

EDIT: My read on these X-Rate-Limit-Type: server 429s, based on Riot's rate-limiting docs : https://developer.riotgames.com/docs/portal

It looks like an "edge level" thing rather than one of our own limits. The docs note that when a limit comes from an underlying service, the 429 has no X-Rate-Limit-Type header at all: Only when the rate limiting is enforced by the API edge infrastructure will this header be included.

Ours does include the header, so it's enforced at the API edge.

I don't know exactly what server is, but I'm interpreting it as something on Riot's side that has nothing to do with our personal/app limits. That fits the symptoms: it appeared suddenly, doesn't correlate with our demand (fires off-peak as much as peak), and only hits this one method while everything else flows fine.

If that's right, there's nothing to fix in our request patterns, the move is to handle it gracefully: respect Retry-After, back off on this method, and degrade the UI instead of erroring.

If anyone has better info on what server means, I'd love to be corrected.