2026-02-25: Pipelines in for gitlab-org/gitlab don't run due to "Project exceeded the allowed number of jobs in active pipelines. Retry later."

Pipelines in for gitlab-org/gitlab don't run due to "Project exceeded the allowed number of jobs in active pipelines. Retry later." (Severity 3)

Problem: Pipelines in gitlab-org/gitlab stopped running, with jobs stuck in a pending state and displaying 'Project exceeded the allowed number of jobs in active pipelines. Retry later.'

Impact: All new pipelines for gitlab-org/gitlab were unable to start, with over 1,600 jobs stuck in the pending state. No other projects were affected. The backlog has since cleared and new pipelines are running as expected.

Causes: A single job linked to a merge request with over 22,000 commits caused excessive resource usage during dependency checks, leading to runner timeouts. This job was not automatically cancelled when its parent pipeline was cancelled, which blocked runners from processing other jobs.

Response strategy: We raised the active CI job limit for the Ultimate plan from 60,000 to 100,000. We identified and cancelled the problematic job, which allowed runners to recover and process pending jobs. We plan to revert the job limit once stability is confirmed and are following up to improve job cancellation when parent pipelines are cancelled.

This ticket was created to track INC-7776, by incident.io 🔥