Two orphan Actions runs stay queued with zero jobs; cancel/force-cancel return 409

[AyuBBlack]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Other

Discussion Details

Observed behaviour

Two workflow runs created on October 7 remain queued, with conclusion: null, zero jobs (total_count: 0), and unchanged updated_at equal to their creation time. Newer serialized deployment runs complete normally.

Normal cancellation and the official force-cancel endpoint return HTTP 409. The latter says: Cannot cancel a workflow run that has not been queued yet. Deletion returned HTTP 403. We have stopped retrying mutations.

Impact and request

The inconsistent state blocks a deployment-quiescence prerequisite. Please advise the supported escalation channel or ask the GitHub Actions team to reconcile the scheduler and public run metadata, so these orphan runs reach a terminal state. Private run identifiers can be supplied through an official private support channel.

The authenticated Support portal lists this account as Standard with technical support not included and does not offer an Actions technical category. We do not want to misclassify the report as a billing or security incident.

Similar reports checked

• https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/206436
• https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/208105

Those reports describe the same queued/zero-jobs/409 contradiction. Is there a supported free-account route for staff reconciliation? No credentials, private repository identifiers, workflow contents, or customer data are included in this report.

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[MalikAhed]

The 409 is consistent with a scheduler metadata race: the public run record says queued, but the cancellation endpoint does not consider it queued yet, and a zero-job run has no runner-side action that can repair it. Retrying cancel/force-cancel will not change that state, so preserving the run IDs and timestamps is the right call.

For a free account, use the GitHub Support contact form’s general/account routing and explicitly request GitHub Actions scheduler reconciliation; the form category does not need to be “billing” or “security.” Include the repository/run URLs, workflow IDs, creation and last-update UTC times, the exact 409 response, and the fact that total_count is zero. Do not include tokens or private workflow contents. Also attach the two related public discussion links so Support can correlate the recurring state.

As a safe operational workaround, treat those run IDs as stuck metadata and remove them from the quiescence check after recording them, while confirming that newer runs complete normally. A maintainer can then reconcile or purge the orphan records server-side; there is no supported API mutation that can force a run from this contradictory state to a terminal conclusion. If this guidance resolves the escalation path, please click Mark as answer.