Why are these requests causing HTTP 422: Unprocessable Entity errors?

Question

We are longtime users of Intercom’s API.  The majority of our requests to Intercom’s API succeed.  Here are examples of two payloads that consistently fail.{  "event_name": "new-feature-receive_this_response",  "created_at": 1761447241,  "user_id": "x12x227f8x4067cx7a5dx97x"} {  "event_name": "experiments-show_experiment",  "created_at": 1761447325,  "user_id": "x12x227f8x4067cx7a5dx97x",  "metadata": {    "label": "experiment_questions"  }} When they fail, Intercom’s API just returns a 422 with no additional details about the problem. Reading through the docs, I can’t figure out what is wrong with these.  They both have event_name and created_at, the two required fields.  One has metadata, and one does not, but metadata is listed as optional, anyway.  I tried adjusting the event_names — replacing underscores with hyphens, truncating them &c., even trying a random string of 10 ascii chars, but these requests always still fail.  I got a coding agent to read through the docs, and it couldn’t figure out what I’m missing either.  I’m completely baffled — why are these failing?

Storyworth Team · Accepted Answer

I figured it out: we hit the quota of 120 events.I archived a bunch of unused events, and now all the failures have stopped.This error message could be a LOT clearer! Or documented somewhere more clearly, at least!

richardcole · Answer

A 422 from Intercom usually means the event timestamp (created_at) is invalid. The value 1761447241 is far in the future — Intercom expects a Unix timestamp near the current time (seconds since 1970). Try using Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000) or a current timestamp, and the requests should succeed.

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