Obvious/Help Center

Agent Not Responding or Stuck

Published February 28, 2026 · Last updated March 5, 2026 · 2 min read

Your agent sent a message and nothing is happening. The loading indicator is spinning, the task stopped mid-way, or the agent went quiet after a long run.

Here's how to figure out what's going on and get moving again.

First: is the agent paused or frozen?

There's an important difference.

Paused and waiting — the agent finished as much as it could and is waiting for you to tell it to continue. You'll see a message in the thread explaining what it was doing, ending with something like "I hit my step limit. Send a follow-up to keep going." This is normal for complex, multi-step tasks. Reply in the thread — "continue," "keep going," anything — and the agent picks up where it left off.

Frozen or stuck — the agent has a loading indicator running but isn't making progress. No message explaining a pause. The description hasn't changed in a couple of minutes. This is a different problem and needs a different fix.

If the agent is frozen

Check the status indicator. Look for a timer counting up below the chat input. If you see one with a description like "Analyzing" or "Writing," the agent is still working. Give it a minute or two before intervening.

Stop and resend. Click the Stop button in the chat input area. Once it stops, retype or resend your last message. Stopping and resending clears most stuck states — the agent retries fresh.

Start a new thread. If stopping didn't help, click the + button at the top of the thread list to start a new thread. Type your request there.

New threads give the agent a clean context. If the original thread had a long conversation history or hit an edge case mid-task, a fresh thread sidesteps both.

Refresh the page. Sometimes the issue is the connection between your browser and Obvious, not the agent. Refresh with Ctrl+R (Windows) or Cmd+R (Mac). After the page reloads, open your thread and check whether the agent finished while the connection was down.

If nothing works

Email help@obvious.ai with a description of what you were working on and what the agent was doing when it got stuck.

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