Data engineering·Orchestration and running it in anger
the scheduler thinks the task is running, the worker that was running it died an hour ago, and nothing has noticed.
Zombie task
Also calledorphaned task, stuck run
A task the orchestrator believes is alive but whose process is gone, usually after a worker crash or an evicted container. It is the failure that does not fail: no error, no retry, just a run that never finishes and a dependency chain that never advances. Every orchestrator has a heartbeat mechanism for detecting it, and the timeout on that mechanism is the real bound on how long a pipeline can be silently stuck.