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What to do when a background task is stuck

Troubleshoot a stuck ATSReady background job by reading what the detail pane already tells you and restarting from the right workflow.

Activity · about 3 minutes

On this page
  1. Symptom
  2. Cause
  3. Check
  4. Action
  5. Why the import page and Activity can disagree
  6. Related pages

If Activity says Stuck, the direct meaning is: the job is still pending, and it did not start within the time ATSReady expects.

Symptom

  • the Activity list says Stuck
  • or the detail pane shows Pending with Appears stuck

Cause

Stuck is not a state of its own. It is a flag added to a job that is still Pending, and the job's own state is unchanged underneath it.

The flag is raised 30 seconds after the job was created, if the job has still not reported anything by then. That is deliberately impatient: a resume import normally begins within a few seconds, so half a minute of silence is already unusual and worth telling you about. It does not mean the job has failed, and the flag is never a prediction that it will.

It is decided on the server and stored against the job, so reloading the page does not clear it and opening the entry elsewhere shows the same flag.

There is no screenshot on this page. The state it describes exists only in a window that opens 30 seconds after a job that failed to start, and closes when a scheduled sweep resolves it about an hour later; there is no way to hold a job in it for a capture.

Check

  1. Open the entry in Activity.
  2. Read the detail pane. For a stalled import it already answers the question you would otherwise go looking for: it says nothing has been written to your journey, and that the import has not touched your data. Do not go hunting for a partial result — there is not one.
  3. Note how long ago the pane says the job was requested.

Action

  1. Wait, and leave the page open if you want to watch. It updates itself: it keeps a live connection for step events and polls as a fallback, so a job that starts late will show that here without a reload.
  2. If nothing has changed after a few more minutes, start the work again from the workflow that began it. For a resume import, that means uploading the file again — see Import a resume.

Why the import page and Activity can disagree

If you started a resume import and left its page open, the two surfaces do not tell the same story, and the gap between them is wide.

The import page treats the same 30-second mark as a failure. It stops waiting and shows:

Import processing has not started. Please retry.

Activity does not. It keeps reporting Pending with Appears stuck for as long as the job is still pending, because that is what the record honestly says. A scheduled sweep is what eventually resolves it: a job that never started is marked failed 60 minutes after it was requested, and only then does the Activity entry read Failed, recording that it never started within the hour.

Neither surface is wrong, and the import page is the more useful one to act on. Treat the import page's message as a prompt to retry, and treat Activity's continuing Pending as the record catching up rather than as a sign the job is still likely to finish.