In this paper we study the Fredholm properties of Toeplitz operators acting on weighted Bergman spaces A p ν (B n ), where p ∈ (1, ∞) and B n ⊂ C n denotes the n-dimensional open unit ball. Let f be a continuous function on the Euclidean closure of B n . It is well-known that then the corresponding Toeplitz operator T f is Fredholm if and only if f has no zeros on the boundary ∂B n . As a consequence, the essential spectrum of T f is given by the boundary values of f . We extend this result to all operators in the algebra generated by Toeplitz operators with bounded symbol (in a sense to be made precise down below). The main ideas are based on the work of Suárez et al. ([17,24]) and limit operator techniques coming from similar problems on the sequence space ℓ p (Z) ([13, 15, 19] and references therein).