Finding which PRs have been taken out of the Merge Queue due to failed status checks

Renovate maintainers can now identify pull requests removed from GitHub's Merge Queue due to failed status checks using a GraphQL query, as demonstrated in a blog post. The query, run via `gh api graphql`, searches for open, approved PRs in the renovatebot/renovate repository and checks for `REMOVED_FROM_MERGE_QUEUE_EVENT` timeline items. In the example output, PR 45223 was flagged as removed due to 'failed_checks' on 2026-08-11, while PRs 45225 and 44971 remained in the queue.

In the Renovate https://docs.renovatebot.com/ project, we use the Merge Queue to merge PRs. If a PR fails its status checks, it will be pulled out of the Merge Queue, and a maintainer will need to re-queue it, if it is a transient error. For those of you unaware, GitHub are having a pretty hard time recently with outages https://isgithubcooked.com/ , which means that we're seeing an increase in the number of PRs being pulled out of the Merge Queue due to transient errors due to GitHub's instability and in rare cases, due to flakiness in our test suite . For a number of these PRs, they're dependency updates that Renovate raises :yo dawg: which means that a maintainer doesn't necessarily see they're unmerged. If we want to find out which PRs are approved, but not merged due to the merge queue un-queuing them, we can use the following GraphQL query: bash via Claude Sonnet 5 $ gh api graphql -f query='query { search query: "repo:renovatebot/renovate is:pr is:open review:approved", type: ISSUE, first: 50 { nodes { ... on PullRequest { number title reviewDecision timelineItems itemTypes: REMOVED FROM MERGE QUEUE EVENT , first: 5 { nodes { ... on RemovedFromMergeQueueEvent { createdAt reason } } } } } } }' { "data": { "search": { "nodes": { "number": 45225, "reviewDecision": "APPROVED", "timelineItems": { "nodes": }, "title": "chore deps : update dependency @biomejs/biome to v2.5.7 main " }, { "number": 45223, "reviewDecision": "APPROVED", "timelineItems": { "nodes": { "createdAt": "2026-08-11T13:26:04Z", "reason": "failed checks" } }, "title": "fix deps : update ghcr.io/renovatebot/base-image docker tag to v13.84.2 main " }, { "number": 44971, "reviewDecision": "APPROVED", "timelineItems": { "nodes": }, "title": "fix manager/mix : run mix commands from the lock file's directory" } } } } In this case, we can see that PR 45223 was taken off the Merge Queue and needs to be merged.