Pausing a Subscription

Pause a subscription when its deliveries should stop for a while: the receiving system is under maintenance, its template is being fixed after a schema change, or you are investigating something. Nothing is lost.

What a pause does

Events keep fanning out to the subscription. Each delivery is recorded with status paused, and nothing is queued or attempted.
Deliveries that were already queued when you paused still go out.
Other subscriptions on the same webhook are unaffected. (Pausing the whole webhook stops all of them, and records nothing for events that arrive while it is paused.)
A pause is not a failure of the receiving system, so it never affects the webhook’s health or raises health alerts.

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/v1/consumers/acme/subscriptions/{subscription_id}:pause \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"reason": "receiver maintenance until Friday"}'

The subscription then shows paused: true, paused_at and paused_reason. Pausing again updates the reason and keeps the original time. In the UI, use Pause on the subscription; its card shows the reason while it is paused.

Resuming

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/v1/consumers/acme/subscriptions/{subscription_id}:resume

New deliveries are attempted again straight away. Deliveries held during the pause are not sent automatically: you decide what to replay. The response tells you how many there are and when the pause began:

{ "subscription_id": "…", "paused": false, "paused_since": "2026-09-30T10:00:00Z", "paused_deliveries": 42 }

To send them, snapshot them with the delivery list and start a batch retry:

curl "http://localhost:8080/v1/consumers/acme/deliveries?status=paused&subscription_id={subscription_id}&created_after=2026-09-30T10:00:00Z&prepare_retry=true"
# -> {"retry_id": "…", …}
curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/v1/consumers/acme/deliveries:retryBatch \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"repush_id": "…"}'

Narrow created_after (or add created_before) to replay only part of the window. In the UI, resuming a subscription that held deliveries offers Retry paused deliveries.

Pausing from an import

When importing event types, --pause-affected (API: subscription_policy: "pause") pauses every subscription whose template fails against the new schema, in the same transaction, with the import as the reason. See Moving Event Types Between Environments.

Where pause fits in a delivery

Delivery outcomes: an accepted event fans out; inactive webhooks get nothing; paused subscriptions get a paused delivery with no job until resumed and retried; otherwise a job runs, the transform renders or fails (fail marks template_error, fallback sends the envelope), the request is sent, and only receiver responses count toward webhook health.

Only the receiving system’s responses count toward the webhook’s health. Paused deliveries and template errors never do.