To reduce the potential for renewed network congestion after a need for a restriction of data communications for background applications has been eliminated, the examples implement techniques in which a mobile device calculates a distributed deactivation delay value corresponding to an amount of time to wait before deactivating the restriction. The mobile device may generate a seed value unique to the mobile device for use in generating an initial distributed deactivation delay value and random control values generated by a threshold determination. The threshold determination iterates through generating a respective control value and calculating a respective threshold value until either a relationship between the respective control value and the respective threshold value meets a threshold condition or a maximum number of iterations are performed. Each threshold determination iteration increases the initial distributed deactivation delay value such that the distributed deactivation delay value is relative to a total of performed iterations.