Skip to content

Abandoning Tasks Docs #3460

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Open
sburmanoctopus wants to merge 2 commits into
base: main
Choose a base branch
from
+5 −1
Open

Abandoning Tasks Docs #3460

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
2 commits
Select commit Hold shift + click to select a range
5ec522e
Abandoning Tasks
sburmanoctopus Sep 14, 2026
98a0590
Making it brief
sburmanoctopus Sep 15, 2026
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
6 changes: 5 additions & 1 deletion src/pages/docs/releases/manually-fail-a-task.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
---
layout: src/layouts/Default.astro
pubDate: 2023-01-01
modDate: 2024-08-29
modDate: 2026-09-14
title: Manually fail a task
description: How to manually fail a running or canceling task when tasks hang or get stuck.
icon: fa-solid fa-circle-stop
Expand All @@ -17,3 +17,7 @@ When a task is queued, you'll see a list of tasks that it is waiting on in the t
:::

You can navigate to any of these tasks, and then click the Cancel button in the top right corner on the executing/waiting/queued task (you may need to click it twice). This will mark the blocked task as Failed and then allow your new task to proceed.

## Abandon a stuck task

If a deployment or runbook run never finishes canceling, you can abandon it. Once a task has been canceling for more than 10 minutes, an **Abandon** button appears on the task page. Abandoning records the task as **Canceled** so it stops blocking work waiting on it, but it only changes what Octopus records: any scripts or steps already running on your deployment targets keep running untracked, the usual cancellation clean-up is skipped, and the action can't be undone. Treat it as a last resort when the stuck task is causing more harm than the inconsistency it leaves behind. You'll need the `TaskCancel` permission for the task's project and environment.