Midjourney Stuck on Waiting to Start: How to Fix

When you send a prompt to Midjourney, you expect to see the progress percentage climb from 0% to 100% within a minute. However, it is common for generations to get stuck indefinitely on "Waiting to start," freeze mid-generation (often at 0% or 93%), or fail to produce an image altogether.

This issue typically stems from server congestion, a desynchronization between Discord and the Midjourney bot, queue limits, or a billing mismatch. Follow these practical steps to diagnose and resolve stuck Midjourney jobs.

1. Check for Midjourney Outages and Discord Issues Before changing any settings, confirm if the problem is on Midjourney's side. Midjourney does not run on its own isolated platform; it relies heavily on Discord's API and CDN infrastructure.

• Check the #status Channel: Open the official Midjourney Discord server and check the #status channel. The developers post real-time updates here if there is an active database migration, server outage, or GPU cluster failure.
• Check Midjourney’s Status Page: Go to status.midjourney.com to check the operational health of the web app, image generators, and database services.
• Check Discord's API Status: If Discord is experiencing gateway issues, Midjourney cannot receive or respond to your prompts. Visit discordstatus.com to ensure "API" and "Gateway" are fully operational.

2. Cancel and Resubmit the Stuck Job A job that sits on "Waiting to start" for more than three minutes has likely been dropped by the queue manager. Leaving it alone rarely fixes the loop; you must manually clear it and try again.

1. Locate the stuck prompt in your direct messages or the generation channel.
2. React to the message with the red "X" emoji (❌). To do this, hover over the message, click Add Reaction, search for "cross", and select the red ❌.
3. The Midjourney bot will acknowledge this command by deleting the message and canceling the job from its active queue.
4. Paste your prompt again to start a clean generation.

3. Verify Your Active Jobs and Subscription Midjourney limits the number of jobs you can run concurrently. If you exceed this limit, new prompts will stall indefinitely without warning.

1. In any channel where the Midjourney bot is present, type /info and press Enter.
2. Examine the output in the message sent back by the bot. Look at Subscription, Visibility Mode, and Active Jobs.
3. If Active Jobs shows 3/3 (or your plan's maximum concurrent limit), any subsequent prompt will sit on "Waiting to start" until a current job finishes.
4. If your Subscription status says "Trial Ended" or "Inactive," your jobs will not queue. Midjourney sometimes fails to alert users of expired cards in the chat window until they run /info manually.

4. Toggle Generation Modes If Midjourney's primary GPU clusters are overloaded, switching your generation speed can route your prompt to a different queue.

• Switch to Relax Mode: If you are stuck in Fast mode, type /relax and press Enter. Try running your prompt again. Relax mode has a different queue priority system and can sometimes bypass stuck Fast-queue nodes.
• Switch back to Fast Mode: If you are in Relax mode and have remaining hours, type /fast and press Enter, then resubmit the prompt.

5. Switch Your Discord Interface Sometimes the issue is client-side rendering. Discord may fail to show the progress updates of the image, even though Midjourney has finished generating it on the backend.

1. If you are using the Discord desktop application, force-restart it (Ctrl+R on Windows, Cmd+R on Mac).
2. Log in to Discord via a web browser (discord.com/app) and check if the image has populated.
3. Alternatively, log in to the official Midjourney website (midjourney.com). Go to your My Images tab. Often, images stuck at "Waiting to start" on Discord have already generated successfully and are viewable in your website gallery.

When to Escalate If `/info` confirms you have an active subscription, you have no other running jobs, and every prompt still gets stuck on "Waiting to start" for over 15 minutes, the issue is account-specific.

Navigate to the official Midjourney Discord server and post your issue in the #member-support channel. Explain that you have run /info, have active hours, and have tried canceling jobs with the ❌ emoji. A community guide or moderator can manually reset your active queue thread.