Pausing a Live Journey: What Really Happens?

Sometimes a live journey needs a moment.

Maybe a message went out with the wrong wording. Maybe the business needs to hit pause because of an outage, a product issue, or simply because something no longer feels right. The good news is that pause is supported in Customer Insights - Journeys. The not-so-obvious part is how contacts behave depending on where they are in the journey when the pause happens.

Here is what that means in practice:

• If the contact meets the condition within the allowed time, and the journey is resumed before the time limit expires, the contact goes to the Yes branch.
• If the time limit expires before the journey is resumed, the contact automatically goes to the No branch.

For contacts in any other tile, they move to the first tile where pause is supported and stay there until the journey resumes.

Why it matters

Pause is not always a full freeze.

If your journey includes waits with time limits, the timing still matters. A long pause can change the path contacts take through the journey.

Takeaway

Before pausing a live journey, check where contacts are in the flow and whether any time-based conditions could expire while the journey is paused.

Because in Customer Insights - Journeys, pause is supported — but it is not identical across all tiles.