Month: January 2025

Azure DevOps: Pipeline fails with ‘Job is pending’

This seems like a really strange error and I have to admit, it stumped me for months. I am running an automated job once a week and the result is sent to me via e-mail. A great way to start the week. This started failing and I tried to solve it but failed again and again. I ran the job manually instead.

Until this morning

The pipeline

The pipeline is really simple.

  1. Get values from a KeyVault.
  2. Execute a PowerShell script using values.
  3. Send an output file as an email attachment.

The problem

My pipeline just failed with the message: “Job is pending”.

Not much information to go on.

A quick google search did not really turn up anything useful for my case.

The solution

Turns out that there was an authentication error in a Library.
The pipeline uses a Library to get a key to authenticate to the send e-mail service. This Library uses a service connection to authenticate. This service connection was invalid and the Library could not be populated at runtime.

I updated the service connection and everything just worked.