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A running broadcast stops itself automatically the moment it detects one of five specific conditions, and the exact reason is shown in plain language on the campaign's detail page, never left as a silent stall. This article lists every reason, what triggers it, and whether the campaign continues on its own or needs you to act.
Paused reasons
- 1Open the paused campaign's detail page
- 2Read the reason banner at the top
- 3Match the reason against the table below
- 4Act on it if needed
- 5Resume manually if the campaign needs you
Before you start
- No setup is required to get this protection; it runs the same way on every campaign, on every plan.
- Know where to look: the pause reason always appears at the top of the broadcast's own detail page, styled as a warning box, the moment you open it.
- Understand the difference between "Paused" (needs you, or waiting on an external condition) and "Scheduled" with a resume time (will continue automatically); both are visible in the campaign's status badge.
Steps
- Open the paused campaign's detail page. From the Broadcasts list, click the campaign showing a Paused (or, for an auto-resuming park, Scheduled) status badge.
Read the reason banner at the top. It states either "Sending paused" (needs action) or "Sending will continue automatically" (a scheduled resume), followed by the specific reason in one plain sentence, and, when relevant, "Continues at [time]."
Match the reason against the table below to understand what caused it and what, if anything, you need to do.
Act on it if needed. For a paused template, go fix or resubmit it under Templates. For a red quality rating, wait, sending less until it recovers is what actually helps. For an over-quota pause, check your plan under Settings, Billing. For a tripped failure-rate breaker, investigate the audience or the template before resuming, since resuming without fixing the underlying issue will likely trip it again.
Resume manually if the campaign needs you to. Once the underlying issue is resolved, click Resume sending on the campaign detail page. This re-runs every send-time guard, so a campaign resumed for a reason that still genuinely applies will simply park itself again with an updated explanation rather than burning through the remaining audience.
What you will see
A paused campaign shows a status badge of either Paused or, for an auto-resuming park, Scheduled with a resume time. The reason banner is always visible without needing to scroll. Every recipient not yet reached stays in pending status; nothing is marked failed or skipped just because the campaign stopped, unless the specific reason is the daily-limit park with auto-continue turned off, in which case the untouched remainder is marked skipped_quota.
The five pause reasons
| Reason shown | What triggers it | Resumes automatically? |
|---|---|---|
| Template paused by Meta | Error 132015 (a template is under quality review) or 132016 (a template has been paused for sustained low quality) | No, stays paused until the template is released by Meta or you fix and resubmit it |
| Portfolio being paced by Meta | Error 135000, a business-wide marketing halt Meta applies to a young or fast-growing portfolio | Yes, in about an hour; utility and service messages are unaffected the whole time |
| Quality rating dropped to red | The sending number's live quality rating from Meta | No, every running campaign on that number pauses so continued sending cannot make the rating worse; resume once the rating recovers |
| Over your plan's conversation quota | Your organization's monthly conversation limit has been reached | No, resumes once the quota resets at the start of your next billing cycle, or immediately if you upgrade |
| Failure rate over 35% | More than 35% of the campaign's last 200 sends (with at least 40 attempted) failed | No, needs investigation first; resuming without understanding why will likely trip the breaker again |
Why does the failure-rate breaker exist, and why does it ignore suppressed recipients?
A campaign that keeps firing into a broken template or a bad contact list wastes the daily portfolio budget and damages the sending number's standing with every additional failure. The failure-rate breaker watches the outcome of the campaign's most recent 200 sends and, once at least 40 have actually been attempted, stops the campaign if more than 35% of them failed. This threshold exists specifically to catch something structurally wrong, a broken template, an invalid audience source, a channel issue, before it burns through the rest of a large audience.
Suppressed recipients are deliberately excluded from this count. A suppression means the platform correctly refused to send, because a recipient opted out, is blocked, or sits inside a frequency-cap window, which is the pre-flight system working exactly as intended, not a fault. A campaign sent to a heavily marketing-capped audience behaving exactly as it should, refusing sends the platform already knows would fail, must never trip a breaker meant to catch something actually going wrong.
Does resuming a campaign ever risk sending into the same problem again?
No, and this is deliberate. Clicking Resume sending does not simply flip the campaign's status back to active and let it barrel forward; it re-runs every one of the send-time guards that could have caused a pause in the first place before attempting a single additional message. If the underlying condition genuinely no longer applies, the template was fixed and re-approved, the quality rating truly recovered, the quota truly reset, sending continues normally from the recipients still pending. If the condition is still present, the campaign parks itself again immediately with an updated explanation rather than attempting to burn through the remaining audience against a wall it already hit once. This is why resuming a campaign is always safe to try: at worst, nothing is sent and you get a fresh, current reason; at best, the remainder of the campaign completes.
Settings and options
| Concept | What it means | Where to check it |
|---|---|---|
| Pause reason | The plain-language explanation of why sending stopped | Top of the broadcast detail page |
| Resume time | When an auto-resuming park will continue | Shown next to the pause reason, when applicable |
| Resume sending button | Manually restarts a paused campaign from its pending recipients | Broadcast detail page action bar, shown only when paused |
| Failure-rate breaker window | Recent sends the breaker evaluates | Last 200, minimum 40 attempted |
| Failure-rate breaker threshold | Failure share that trips the breaker | Over 35% |
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign paused shortly after starting with a template reason | The template hit Meta's quality review (132015) or was flagged for sustained low quality (132016) | Check the template's status under Templates; fix content issues and resubmit if needed |
| Campaign paused with no template issue visible | The portfolio is being paced by Meta (135000), a business-wide condition, not specific to this campaign or template | Wait roughly an hour; it typically resolves on its own, and utility and service messages continue in the meantime |
| Resume sending immediately re-pauses with the same reason | The underlying condition has not actually been resolved yet | Confirm the template is truly released, the quality rating has truly recovered, or quota has truly reset before resuming again |
| Campaign paused for failure rate but the audience looks fine | The template itself may be the problem (a parameter mismatch, a component Meta rejects for every recipient) | Check the error codes on the failed recipients in the recipient table; a repeated single error code across most failures points at the template |
| Campaign shows Scheduled with a resume time far in the future | The daily portfolio budget ran out and the rolling 24-hour window has not reopened yet | Expected; it will resume automatically at the stated time, or you can wait and check back |
Related reading
See pacing, the daily limit and auto-resume for the mechanics behind the daily-limit pause specifically, and why a recipient was suppressed to understand the guard that keeps suppressed rows out of the failure-rate count.