Azure DevOps Pipeline jobs are queued, and we have idle agents, but none are being run

Question

Azure DevOps Pipeline jobs are queued, and we have idle agents, but none are being run

Andrew White 0

This started around 11am Eastern today. We have a number of pipelines that are triggered off of Pull Requests and are normally processed by a Microsoft-hosted Agent pool (max parallelism 1). However, now the jobs are just sitting in the queue, and our agent is sitting idle not having run anything in over 5 hours.

Our agent pool and pipelines jobs haven't changed, and I don't see any capability requirements failing.

The first job in our agent queue has this message: "This agent request is not running yet. Current position in queue: 1. Current parallelism: 0. Max Parallelism for parallelism type 'Microsoft-Hosted Private': 1"

Pravallika KV 11,030 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-03-11T21:32:38.0433333+00:00
Hi @Andrew White ,

Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A.

It sounds like your PR-triggered YAML pipelines aren’t grabbing the single Microsoft-hosted slot even though the agents are idle.

Check Your Parallel‐Job Limits

Go to Project settings > Parallel jobs (or open https://dev.azure.com/{yourOrg}/_settings/buildqueue?_a=concurrentJobs)

Click “View in-progress jobs” to see if a stuck or cancelling run is quietly holding onto your one slot. Even runs in Cancelling state can block new jobs.

Verify Agent Pool Health

In Organization settings > Agent pools > “Azure Pipelines” (Microsoft-hosted private), click Agents and confirm you see idle, online machines and no hidden busy states.

Look for Approvals or Checks

If any stage is gated by an approval or check, the jobs may be waiting there. Those don’t consume a slot but will appear queued until you sign off.

Confirm Pipeline Isn't Paused (Classic only)

If this were a classic build, you’d want to hit the Build Definitions API to inspect "queueStatus"make sure it’s set to "enabled" and not "paused".

Check Azure DevOps Service Status

Head over to https://status.dev.azure.com/ and make sure there aren’t any incidents in your region that could delay agent assignment.

References:

Troubleshoot pipelines stuck in queue

View/manage parallel jobs

Agent pools & capabilities

Hope this helps!
Pravallika KV 11,030 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-03-12T22:44:44.89+00:00

Hi @Andrew White ,following up to see if the above information was helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions.