# 80020: Continuity lost as message delivery rate exceeded

Identifier: `connection_discontinuity_message_rate_exceeded`



Messages were dropped because they were being delivered to the connection faster than its per-connection rate limit allows. Continuity is lost on the affected channels: they keep receiving new messages, but the dropped ones are not redelivered.

## What you should do

What to do depends on whether your application can tolerate the gap:

- If it can, no action is needed and the error can be ignored.
- If it cannot, fetch the messages the connection did not receive from [history](https://ably.com/docs/storage-history/history.md) when it encounters this error.

To stop hitting the limit, consider spreading subscriptions across more connections, so that each one receives fewer messages. If a connection genuinely needs to receive messages at a higher rate, you can [request a higher limit](https://ably.com/docs/general/limits.md).

## Why it happens

Each connection has a maximum rate at which Ably will deliver messages to it, set by your account's limits. When a connection is subscribed to more message traffic than that allows, Ably cannot deliver all of it, so it drops the excess and signals the gap to the affected channels as a continuity loss rather than silently skipping messages.

## What you'll see

The affected channels report a continuity loss but stay attached. The error is reported with code 80020 and HTTP status 400, with a message of the form `Continuity loss on channel as maximum server-to-client message rate exceeded; permitted rate = ...`.