Account Flagged for Acceptable Use Policy Violation

Overview

When logging into CircleCI, you may see the following message on https://circleci.com/error/login-abusive page:

Access restricted

Your account has been flagged due to a violation of our Acceptable Use Policy.

This means your CircleCI user account has been flagged by our automated abuse detection system. While you are flagged, you will be unable to log in to CircleCI or access any of its features.

If you are seeing a message about accessing from a sanctioned region, see CircleCI Terms of Service Violation: Sanctioned Country instead.

Why This Happens

CircleCI uses automated systems to detect potential violations of our Acceptable Use Policy. Common reasons an account may be flagged include:

Excessive resource usage beyond what is expected for your plan tier
Patterns matching known abuse
Suspicious usage patterns in build jobs

These automated systems occasionally produce false positives, particularly for legitimate workloads such as Android/iOS builds, Docker multi-stage builds, or heavy compilation jobs. If your account was flagged in error, we want to help you get access restored.

Prerequisites

Before submitting a review request, please have the following ready:

Your email address associated with the CircleCI account
The build url that you might think cause the flag or most recent build reported to the commit status
The user id found User Settings > Account Integrations or VCS Username.

To find your VCS username, see: Where to Find Your Linked VCS Account Username.

Solution

Review the Acceptable Use Policy: Read CircleCI's Acceptable Use Policy to understand what activities are prohibited. Common violations include using CircleCI resources for cryptocurrency mining, running unauthorized automated processes, or exceeding reasonable usage limits on free-tier plans.
Check your recent build configurations: If you had long-running jobs, high parallelism, or resource-intensive workloads (such as Docker builds with many layers or Android emulator tests), these may have triggered the automated detection. Consider whether you can optimize these workloads.
Fill out the Account Review Request Form: Access the form using this link: Review Request Form. Fill out all required fields accurately, including:
- Your email address
- A build url of your use case and why you believe the flag was applied in error
- The user id of your CircleCI Account
Submit the form and wait for review: After completing the form, submit it for review. CircleCI's security team will evaluate your request and determine if the account restriction can be lifted. Reviews are typically processed within a few business days.
[ONLY] If you are on a paid support plan: Customers on Scale, or custom plans with an active support contract can also open a support ticket for expedited review. Please include your organization ID and VCS username in the ticket.

Preventing Future Flags

To reduce the chance of being flagged again:

Avoid unnecessary parallelism: Don't run more concurrent jobs than your workflow requires
Optimize resource usage: Use the smallest resource class that meets your build needs
Read CircleCI's Acceptable Use Policy to understand what activities are prohibited.

Additional Resources