A production application using Claude receives an occasional 529 'Overloaded' error. What is the BEST practice for handling this?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
When you see an overloaded error, wait and try again with increasing delays. Exponential backoff with jitter keeps retry storms from piling up.
Full Explanation
HTTP 529 (Overloaded) from Anthropic indicates the API is temporarily at capacity. The best practice is to implement exponential backoff with jitter: wait an initial period (for example, 1 second), retry, and if it still fails, double the wait time (2s, 4s, 8s...) while adding random jitter to prevent synchronized retry storms. This is a transient condition that typically resolves quickly, and Anthropic provides retry recommendations in their documentation. Switching immediately to a different AI provider is an overreaction to a temporary condition. Logging the error and failing silently is terrible user experience because the user thinks the request succeeded. Increasing the max_tokens parameter has no relation to server overload and does not address capacity limits.