Actions run attempt orphaned, cannot cancel

[philu-hitrust]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Workflow Deployment

Discussion Details

https://github.com/HITRUSTOps/tf-infra-platform/actions/runs/43097500014
Run ID: 43097500014
Created: Nov 11 at 8:41 PM UTC

This has been stuck in "Queued" since yesterday's Actions incident. Every time I try to cancel it from the UI, I get an error stating "Failed to cancel workflow". Please kill this run.

Also note force cancel didn't work

gh api -X POST /repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/runs/43097500014/force-cancel
{
"message": "Cannot cancel a workflow run that has not been queued yet.",
"documentation_url": "https://docs.github.com/rest/actions/workflow-runs#force-cancel-a-workflow-run",
"status": "409"
}

I opened a support ticket but it was auto-closed with instructions to come here.

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[aungzayyanaing]

There is no user-side way to kill this attempt in the state it is in — and the 409 response explains why.

What the 409 means

Force-cancel only works on a run that is actually queued or in progress. The error "Cannot cancel a workflow run that has not been queued yet", together with zero jobs, means this attempt was created during the November 11 incident but never entered the queue, so there is nothing for cancel to act on. The UI cancel and Delete fail for the same reason: GitHub still records the run as incomplete, and a run cannot be deleted until it reaches a terminal state — which it cannot reach on its own, because no job ever started.

What it does and does not do

No job started, so it is not consuming runner minutes. It also does not block other runs — unless this workflow uses a concurrency group, in which case the stuck attempt can hold that group; if later runs are blocked, temporarily changing the group's name in the workflow lets new runs proceed in a fresh group. Creating a replacement run will not clear the orphaned one.

What can actually clear it

Only GitHub staff can purge an orphaned attempt, so this needs a Support ticket about this specific run, not about the incident in general — that is most likely why your first ticket was auto-closed once the incident was marked resolved. Open a new ticket at support.github.com/contact (category: Actions) and include the run ID 43097500014, attempt 1, the repository, the creation time (Nov 11, 20:41 UTC), the exact 409 response, and that UI cancel and Delete both fail. Ask Support to move the attempt to a terminal state.

No one in the Community can do that for you — nobody here has access to cancel or delete a run in another repository. You can confirm whether it has moved by checking the run with GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/runs/43097500014.