Space stuck in APP_STARTING indefinitely

My Docker Space (free cpu-basic) has been stuck in APP_STARTING for over an hour and won’t come up.

What I’m seeing:

The API reports stage: APP_STARTING with hardware.current: null while hardware.requested: cpu-basic. So no machine is actually being allocated.

In the Hardware settings, the “CPU basic” card shows a spinner as if it’s continuously searching for resources.

The public endpoint times out (HTTP 000).

When it did briefly start earlier, the container logs were completely clean — the app bound correctly to 0.0.0.0:7860 and logged Server listening, but the UI never transitioned to Running.

What I’ve already tried (none worked):

Restart (rebuilds in ~0.5s from cache, then straight to “starting”, nothing happens)

Factory rebuild (full rebuild completes, still stuck)

Toggling hardware / re-selecting CPU basic

This looks like a scheduling / hardware-capacity issue on HF’s side rather than my app. Is there a current capacity shortage on the free cpu-basic pool? How long does this usually take to resolve, and is there anything I can do besides waiting?

Thanks!

I have some news, my space just did runtime error
Scheduling failure: unable to schedule
Container logs:

===== Application Startup =====

Same issue for me, it looks like a HF issue for me

I have been having the same issue for the last 2 hours. Could it be a Hugging Face issue?

Mine is stuck at restarting

Same here. @hysts


I can confirm that I am experiencing the same issue on my side.

I tested a newly created Docker Space with a minimal Streamlit application. The image builds successfully, but the Space remains stuck at “Starting”, and the container log shows only:

===== Application Startup =====

This appears to be the same issue reported in the following threads:

Overview:

  • Multiple users started reporting the issue during the same time period.
  • Both newly created and previously working Spaces are affected.
  • Minimal applications using different frameworks and base images reproduce the issue.
  • The image build completes successfully, but the Space becomes stuck during application startup.
  • Some affected Spaces eventually report “Scheduling failure: unable to schedule”.
  • In at least one report, the API shows hardware.current as null while cpu-basic remains requested.

Since the issue is reproducible with minimal applications across different users and Spaces, this looks more like a Hugging Face-side scheduling, hardware-allocation, or runtime infrastructure issue than an application-specific problem.

The public status page currently shows the service as operational, but this may be a partial issue affecting only Space startup or the free cpu-basic scheduling pool.

Should be fixed now. Thanks!

Restarted just now…will see how it goes.

Thank you! hysts.