Hi Roy!
The error you are receiving is probably because you have exceeded the threshold of the particular image bank’s (that you are using) requests and have been blocked by their firewall or other rate-limiting scheme. In my case, Google scraping does this and will reset in about 24-28 hours. The setting of the cron interval does not have much effect, at least in my case, because I have many posts daily, end even setting the interval to a higher level does not seem to make any difference whatsoever.
The plugin has a built-in php sleep() interval which is set, causing the script to pause, but is, apparently, not of a high enough value.
For instance, If I set it to X days/hours/minutes and have a lot of posts in the last for X days/hours/minutes, it will still be dependent on the sleep() interval.
I believe that the developer, Alex, has plans to make this user-adjustable at some point in the future, however. Hopefully this will work on both the cron operation as well as the bulk manual operation.
Regards,
@brianbrown
P.S. It should also be possible to use WordPress’ built-in proxy server as set in wp-config.php or the proxy of this plugin itself (although I have never been able to get either to work properly).
P.P.S. It is also possible that your server has stopped speaking to the outside world, for whatever reason. I would suggest that you take a look at the results of the site health screen (Tools -> Site Health) to see if your site can communicate with the Internet. Also, if it cannot, it is a good test to go to Plugins -> add new and see if you can search for a plugin. If your site cannot connect to WordPress to search for a plugin, the screen will just hang there with the spinning icon and do nothing else.