Pausing, Resuming & Retrying
Stop a campaign mid-send, pick it back up when you choose, understand auto-pause, and re-send to recipients who failed.
A campaign can be stopped and restarted without messaging anyone twice, and recipients whose message failed can be tried again — automatically, on a schedule you set in the wizard, or by hand from the campaign page.
Pause a Broadcast
Open the campaign. Pause sits to the right of the tabs while messages are still queued.
Confirm Pause campaign: "Recipients who have not been messaged yet are taken off the queue. Messages already sent cannot be recalled. You can resume the campaign later."
The badge reads Pausing while the queue empties, then Paused. Recipients who were not reached stay Pending.
A campaign scheduled for later can be taken off its schedule with Cancel schedule on the Overview tab's Next batch card.
Pause the moment you spot a mistake in a live campaign — a wrong link, a broken variable. You cannot recall what has already gone, but you can stop the rest.
Resume a Broadcast
Click Resume — its badge shows how many recipients are still waiting. It only appears while someone is left to message.
In Resume campaign, choose when it goes out:
| Option | Sends |
|---|---|
| Keep its schedule | At the time the campaign was scheduled for before you paused it. Offered, and selected, only while that time is still ahead |
| Send now | Immediately |
| Pick a new date and time | At a date and Time you choose, in your own timezone |
Click Resume.
"Only the N recipients who were never messaged are sent to." Nobody who already received the message gets it again, and failed recipients are not included — retry those separately.
A time that has already passed is refused: "That time has already passed. Pick a later one, or choose Send now."
Pause or Restart a Drip
A drip has one toggle in the same place:
| Button | Shown when | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Pause Drip | The drip is running | Stops further stages. "Drip campaign paused" |
| Start Drip | You paused it | Starts it again. "Drip campaign started" |
| Resume Drip | RateUp paused it | Starts it again once the cause is fixed |
When RateUp Pauses a Campaign
If your account cannot send, a campaign is paused instead of failing every remaining recipient one by one. The badge turns red, the campaign's team is notified, and a banner on the campaign page says why:
| Banner | Cause | Fix it with |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign paused: campaign credits used up | Your campaign credits are spent | Get more credits — buy a credit pack, upgrade your plan or wait for the monthly reset |
| Campaign paused: conversation limit reached | Your plan's conversation allowance is used up | Get more credits — upgrade or wait for the allowance to reset |
| Campaign paused: WhatsApp payment issue | Meta rejected the payment method on your WhatsApp Business account (error 131042) | Open Meta billing — add or fix the payment method in Meta's billing settings |
| Campaign paused | Another account-level stop | The reason shown in the banner |
Each banner ends with "N recipients have not been messaged yet and will be sent when you resume." Those recipients stay Pending, so once the cause is fixed, Resume in the banner sends to exactly the people who were missed.
Retry Messages Meta Blocked Automatically
Broadcasts can retry failures on their own. Set it up on the wizard's Retries step by turning on Retry blocked messages.
| Setting | Options |
|---|---|
| Strategy | Smart retries (Recommended) — "Retries soon, then spreads the rest across your window — most caps lift within the first hour." Or Every 24 hours — "Same time each day. Predictable, but slower to recover." |
| Max attempts | 1 to 3 retries after the first send. Default 3 |
| Retry window | 1 to 7 days. Anything still blocked at the end is given up. Default 3 days |
| Quiet hours | Off by default. A start and end time when no retry runs — Smart retries space around it; Every 24 hours waits for the morning |
The step draws the resulting timeline and sums it up, for example "Messages Meta refused with a retryable error will be retried up to 3 times over 3 days."
While a retry is booked the campaign shows Retrying, and the Overview's Next batch card shows when it fires and how many "Eligible messages" it will take. Cancel pending retries drops it. If nothing is left to retry when it fires, it cancels itself and the campaign completes.
What is retried automatically
Only a recipient whose latest attempt failed with a retryable error:
| Retried | Examples |
|---|---|
| Yes — Meta's limits | Marketing frequency cap (131049), sending and spam rate limits |
| Yes — temporary errors | Meta or WhatsApp temporarily unavailable, RateUp could not reach WhatsApp |
| Yes — conditions that lift later | Outside the 24-hour window (131047), a throttled Flow (132069), a template still syncing (134101) |
| No | The number could not receive the message (131026), the contact opted out of marketing (131050), a template error, a payment-method problem |
Each retry uses a campaign credit, which is why permanent failures are never retried — waiting does not change them.
Retry Failed Recipients Yourself
On a broadcast's Participants tab:
| Button | Re-sends to |
|---|---|
| Retry now on a failed row | That one recipient |
| Retry selected | The failed recipients you ticked |
| Retry all failed | Every failed recipient — the button shows how many |
Retry now on a booked retry in Next batch fires it straight away.
A manual retry re-sends to failed recipients whatever the reason, including failures an automatic retry would skip. Check the Reason column first: a number that could not receive the message will fail again, and spend another credit doing so.
Retry buttons are disabled while the campaign is still queuing or pausing — "Wait for the campaign's current send to finish." Drips have no retry.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| No Resume button | Everyone has already been messaged | Nothing is left to send; retry failures instead |
| Resume sent nothing to failed recipients | Resume only targets recipients never messaged | Use Retry all failed |
| No Pause button | Nothing is left in the queue, or the campaign is a drip | Use Pause Drip on a drip |
| Retry now on Next batch is disabled | "Nothing to retry — no recipient failed with a retryable error." | Nothing to do — remaining failures are permanent |
| Campaign keeps pausing straight after resuming | The cause is not fixed yet | Check Billing or Meta's billing settings |
Related Pages
- Campaign Details
- Creating a Campaign — the Retries step
- Billing — campaign credits and packs