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[ARTICLE · art-50961] src=discuss.huggingface.co ↗ pub= topic=ai-infrastructure verified=true sentiment=↓ negative

Space stuck in APP_STARTING indefinitely

Hugging Face Spaces users report that Docker Spaces on the free CPU-basic tier are stuck indefinitely in the APP_STARTING stage, with no hardware allocation occurring. The issue appears to be a scheduling or capacity shortage on Hugging Face's side, as restarts, factory rebuilds, and hardware toggles fail to resolve it. Some users eventually see a 'Scheduling failure: unable to schedule' runtime error.

read1 min views1 publishedJul 8, 2026
Space stuck in APP_STARTING indefinitely
Image: Discuss (auto-discovered)

Winou 1 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

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