See the complete route index at https://crusible.dev/llms.txt before following links. # 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 what it was asked to do. **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 is stuck waiting on a person](/docs/troubleshooting/a-run-is-stuck-at-needs-a-human/) is the longer form of that case. **An agent asked for something this channel does not allow.** The **Access** rows in **Channel settings** govern what agents may do on this work: push to the branch, open pull requests, merge without a person, reach production. A channel whose work needs a row that is off stops there. The message in the conversation names the row. ## 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 **Volume** 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 One condition — something in this channel is waiting on a person — is named once per control, so 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 names an **Access** row, no amount of answering clears it. Send your admin the channel name and the row, and they change it in **Channel settings**. 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.