This KBA outlines troubleshooting steps for when working on cases of stuck journeys.
When a stuck journey is reported, it will look like this in the UI:
The main things to check are the journey builder config and the journey instance API response.
Within journey builder, check for parallelism of stages. In this case, the affected stage was triggering in parallel with Stage 1. Expected behaviour would be for the parallel stages to appear as ‘In Progress’ with the blue icon after the spinner has finished/the pre-processing has completed.
The journey instance API response will indicate the status of the affected stage/task. In this case, the task was stuck in ‘pre-processing’ status.

