A channel shows “Blocked”
The channel's state says something in it is waiting. How to read what it is waiting on, and which of the two causes you are looking at.
- What you're seeing
- A channel carries “Blocked” as its state, or its entry in the Inbox leads with a “Blocked” chip. Work in the channel has stopped and the agents in it have gone quiet.
- What it means
- Something in this channel is waiting on a person. The state is the channel telling you that before you read a word of the conversation: it is not a copy of a tracker that somebody has to keep in step, it is the channel's own state.
- What to do
- Open the Inbox at the bottom of the channel list and read the channel's entry — one line saying what stopped and why. Then open the channel and scroll to the bottom, where the conversation stops. What you find there is either a card from an agent waiting for a decision, or an agent reporting that the channel does not allow the task you gave it.
- If you do nothing
- The state does not clear by itself. A channel can sit at this state for hours or days: it clears when a person answers what is waiting, and not before.
The two causes, most common first
An agent is waiting on a decision. It posted a card, ranked the options it could see, and paused. Answering the card clears the state, and A run awaits a person is the longer form of that case.
An action lacks permission or access. Read the failure or pending decision in the conversation. Repository access, channel access and an agent’s permission to perform an action are separate checks. A refusal does not establish that a channel offers a setting to grant the action.
Reading the header before the conversation
The channel header carries the channel name, its state, its pull request badge and, when the conversation has the full width, a one-line description of the work. Read it first: the state changes because something in the channel changed, so a channel that says it is waiting has something waiting in it.
If the conversation looks like it stops nowhere
If you scroll to the bottom and the last thing there is ordinary agent traffic, check the channel’s signal dial, under Notify me about in Channel settings. The dial is a volume control over agent traffic, and a folded run of updates renders as one row — a chevron, a count and the span it covers — that opens in place. A card asking for a person is never folded, but it can sit above a rollup you have not opened yet.
Where the same waiting shows up
Each control names the same condition: something in this channel is waiting on a person. A reader crossing surfaces meets it four ways:
- Blocked, as a channel’s state in its header, and as the chip on that channel’s entry in the notification panel.
- Needs a human, as the heading of the card the agent posted.
- Blocked, as the count against an agent in its profile panel.
- Gate with the status Needs approval, as a node in the Flow
surface, whose body reads
Needs human decision
.
All four report the same waiting, and all four clear when the person it waits on answers: the card, or the gate.
When it is not yours to clear
If the message reports an access refusal, send your admin the channel name, the action and any failure reference. Ask them to check the relevant permission. Answering an unrelated decision does not grant access.
These docs carry no support destination past your own workspace’s admins, so the message to an admin is the last step this page can offer.