A sequence with a problem: how you find out, what happens to your contacts and how to resume it

How do I know a sequence has a problem?

In CRM > Sequences, an amber alert icon appears next to the status pill (Live, Paused or Draft) when the sequence has an unresolved configuration problem. Hover over it: the tooltip reads Needs attention and lists the causes with their step (Step 2: …; if the step is inside a branch, it also names the branch and the condition it belongs to, the way the editor does), up to three; if there are more, it tells you how many. It looks the same in the Cards and Table views. And when you open the sequence, the same notice shows above the tabs, with a See contacts link that takes you to the affected contacts.

The bell lets you know too, with a notification titled Needs attention followed by the sequence's name. It goes to whoever created the sequence and to the CRM Admins (the workspace's owner and admins are CRM Admins by inheritance): it says at which step the sequence has a problem and why, what happened to the contacts (for example, whether they were paused), and clicking it opens the sequence. It rings once per problem, at most once a day: if a hundred contacts run into the same broken step, you get one notification, not a hundred.

What does the engine do when a step fails?

It depends on where the problem is. The engine recognizes it by the error it gets back and, in each case, does whatever causes the least harm:

• A problem with the contact —no email or phone, a number that doesn't receive WhatsApp, a request not to be contacted— affects only that person: usually the step is skipped for them; if instead the same step fails for them three times in a row, their enrollment moves to Failed. There's no notification, because nothing is wrong with the rest of the sequence.
• A passing problem —a provider's rate limit, a momentary outage of WhatsApp or of the mail server— is retried by itself: it waits 15 minutes, then 1 hour, and from then on 4 hours between attempts, within the sequence's schedule if it has one, without notifying anyone. If the step still hasn't gone out after 24 hours, the engine stops treating it as passing and handles it as a configuration problem. If what ran out is Gmail's daily sending quota, the step is retried every hour.
• A configuration problem will fail for everyone who reaches that step: the WhatsApp step has no line selected, or Meta suspended or disconnected the line; the WhatsApp connection lost permission to send through that line; Meta rejects the template (it doesn't exist or isn't approved in that language, or Meta paused or disabled it) or restricted the account; the sender's Gmail mailbox got disconnected; the sender isn't verified; the target stage of Change deal stage no longer exists in that pipeline; the step can't find anyone to assign the task to; the recipient of Notify a user is no longer a member of the account. Then the engine pauses the enrollment at that step, with the cause in plain sight, and lets you know.
• An error whose source isn't clear could belong to one contact or to the whole sequence. Until that's settled, it takes the contact's path (the step is skipped for that person or, after the third failure in a row, their enrollment moves to Failed) and pauses no one: stopping everyone over an error that may belong to a single person would do more harm. If the same error repeats on the same step with three different contacts within 72 hours, then the sequence gets flagged and the notification comes.

A configuration problem always pauses the contact, also when the broken step is an Automatic email or a WhatsApp — automatic and the sequence has steps on other channels further ahead: the content of a step often builds on the previous ones —the second email may take for granted that the WhatsApp went out—, and carrying on without it would send a message that doesn't add up. The one exception is a WhatsApp — automatic step with If the send fails set to Create a task for the owner: when Meta rejects the message, the task to send it by hand is created and the contact carries on, so they don't get it twice once everything is fixed. The notification comes all the same.

Which problems notify you without stopping the sequence?

If the ruleset or the schedule you picked in the Settings tab no longer exists (someone deleted it), the sequence keeps running —without a ruleset, with the fixed protections only; without a schedule, at any hour— and lets you know once so you can pick another one. The same goes when the sender's Gmail mailbox gets disconnected and that address is among your verified senders (Configure your sending domain so your emails arrive): emails keep going out through the MB Suite server while the mailbox owner reconnects it in their Personal integrations. In these cases, the icon turns off by itself once the setup is right again.

Where do I see what happened to each contact?

In the sequence's Contacts tab, an enrollment the engine stopped shows as Paused. Hover over the status and the tooltip tells you at which step and why, for example: Paused by the engine at Step 3: the WhatsApp step has no line selected. Fix the configuration and resume. And the Activity tab logs every step of every contact and, when something didn't go out —Skipped, Delayed, Error—, the reason written underneath.

How do I fix it and get it working again?

• Read the cause: it's in the list icon's tooltip, in the notice at the top of the sequence, in the bell and on the Paused status in the Contacts tab.
• If the problem is in a step —the line, the template, the target stage, who gets the task, the notification's recipient—, fix it in the Editor. The editor saves by itself (you'll see All changes saved) and, with the sequence on, once that step is saved the enrollments paused on it resume by themselves and the icon stops flagging that problem.
• If you change something that applies to the whole sequence —the Sender, the ruleset or the schedule in the Settings tab—, with the sequence on, every enrollment the engine paused because of a configuration problem resumes.
• If the cause was outside the sequence —you reconnected the WhatsApp line or the Gmail mailbox, you gave the person an owner—, since you didn't touch the step, nothing resumes by itself. In the Contacts tab, above the table, an amber notice tells you how many contacts were paused because of a configuration problem: use its Resume N paused button (N is how many there are) and they all resume at once. For a single one, use Resume in its row's menu.

Resumed enrollments carry on in the engine's next cycle, within a few minutes, from the same step where they stopped. Resuming hides nothing: if the cause is still there, the engine pauses them again and the icon lights up again, so fix it first.

To resume, the sequence has to be on: if it's paused, the notice in Contacts asks you to activate it first and the button stays disabled (nor do enrollments resume by themselves when you save the step). The button can be used by whoever can edit the sequence: its creator, Managers and CRM Admins.

Why does a WhatsApp from the sequence show as not delivered?

Sometimes Meta accepts a WhatsApp from the sequence and rejects it a while later. The send still shows in Activity, and an entry WhatsApp not delivered (Meta rejected it after sending) is added with the reason. The enrollment doesn't stop: by the time the rejection arrives, it has already moved on. But if the reason is the line, the template or the WhatsApp Business account —for example, the template stopped being approved or Meta restricted the account—, the sequence gets flagged and you're notified, because it will happen to everyone who reaches that step. And if the reason is that the number doesn't receive WhatsApp, from then on the automatic WhatsApps of every sequence are skipped for that contact, until a WhatsApp you send them does get through: nobody keeps insisting on a number that doesn't receive them.

Next step: review how each state in the Contacts tab gets unblocked in Sequence tasks: where they land and how they unblock the next step, and if the problem is the line, how to get it back in My WhatsApp doesn't send or receive messages.