Almost any request to /answers on Stack Overflow (including a single-post request, e.g. this) results in a 10 second backoff, even if no recent requests have been made to the API. My guess is something similar to what happened in The API is being very standoffish has occurred -- some bad query plan has been generated, causing any request to yield a backoff.
Could someone please investigate and see why all the backoffs are being generated? Obviously, this isn't too important, but it would be nice not to have a backoff generated on every /answers request.
fromdate(or similar restriction), the problem seems to go away.