Why were my links banned?

If your shared links have stopped working, and you've ruled out other causes, your links may have been banned for one of the reasons detailed below. When your links are banned, you can't share them, but the files are still available to you in your Dropbox.

Traffic limits

Links are automatically banned if they generate unusually large amounts of traffic.

• The total amount of traffic that all of your links together can generate without getting banned is 20 GB per day.
• The total number of downloads that all of your links together can generate is 100,000 downloads per day.

• The total amount of traffic that all of your links together can generate without getting banned is about 200 GB per day.
• There's no daily limit to the number of downloads that your links can generate.

If your account hits our limit, we'll send a message to the email address registered to your account. Your links will be temporarily disabled, and anyone who tries to access them will see an error page instead of your files.

But there's no way my links generated that much traffic!

Even with a traffic limit of 20 GB or about 200 GB per day, or 100,000 downloads per day, it's entirely possible for links to go over the limit. Let's say you've sent a link to a file to a small number of people. One of the recipients could have sent the link to others, leading to more people viewing the file and using up the allotted traffic. Or one of the recipients could have downloaded the file multiple times; each download is counted separately for tracking purposes. If you publish your link on social media, it may quickly spread to a very large audience with or without your knowledge.

Dropbox Pro and Dropbox for Business users: You may be able to reduce traffic to your links by setting passwords and expirations for them.

Can I purchase more bandwidth?

Unfortunately, Dropbox does not offer a way to buy an additional bandwidth allowance for your account.

How do I know which links contributed most to the ban? Can you provide traffic data for my links?

Unfortunately, we're not able to provide details on which of your links contributed most to your account going over the limit, or how much traffic each link generated. Statistics or metrics relating to shared links are not tracked, so we cannot provide information as to why the shared links were banned.

Abuse

We occasionally receive reports at abuse@dropbox.com that a shared link violates our Acceptable Use Policy. If we find a violation, all links and sharing will be banned for that account. If you think your links have been suspended incorrectly for this reason, contact our support team and we'll take a look.