They literally do block you for a period of time until you are out of the rate limit. That is how rate limits work. That's why you don't get to access the resou

They literally do block you for a period of time until you are out of the rate limit. That is how rate limits work. That's why you don't get to access the resource you requested, because their system literally blocked you from doing so. See when you're trying to be pedantic and all about semantics, you should make sure you've crossed your Ts and dotted your Is. > Block – AWS WAF blocks the request and applies any custom blocking behavior that you've defined. from https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/waf-rule-statement-type-rate-based-request-limiting.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/waf-ru... And my favourite > Rate limiting blocks users, bots, or applications that are over-using or abusing a web property. Rate limiting can stop certain kinds of bot attacks. From CloudFlare's explainer https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-rate-limiting/ https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-rate-limiti... Every documentation on rate limit will include the word block. Because that's what you do, you allow access for a specific amount of requests and then block those that go over.