Why did my post fail?
Failed posts live on the Posts → Failed tab. PostFast auto-retries 3 times before giving up; after that you can retry, edit, or duplicate the post.
If a scheduled post didn't go live, here's what happened and what to do about it.
Where to find failed posts
Open Posts from the sidebar. The page has four tabs: Scheduled, Published, Draft, and Failed. Failed posts only appear on the Failed tab — they don't show in Calendar or Dashboard.
Each failed post shows a red alert icon with an inline error message from the platform. The error tooltip also links back here for more context.
Auto-retry — what happens before "Failed"
PostFast retries automatically before marking anything as failed. The sequence:
| Attempt | Wait before retry |
|---|---|
| 1 fails | 2 minutes |
| 2 fails | 5 minutes |
| 3 fails | 15 minutes |
| All 3 fail | Status → Failed |
While this is happening, the post stays on the Scheduled tab with "Retry attempt: 1/3" (etc.) in amber. Your original scheduled time is preserved, and you can reschedule it yourself if you don't want to wait.
You'll see the post appear on the Failed tab only after all three retries fail.
Retry, edit, or duplicate
On the Failed tab, open the three-dot dropdown on a post:
- Retry — reschedules the post for 2 minutes from now with the same content. Sets approval to Approved so it publishes directly.
- Edit — opens the composer. Useful if the failure was caused by the post itself (duplicate content, media too large, caption rules) and you need to change something before trying again.
- Duplicate — creates a fresh draft with the same content. Handy if you want to keep the failed post as a record.
How you'll know a post failed
Two signals, both only after the 3 auto-retries are exhausted:
- Email to the workspace owner — includes the workspace name, platform, account handle, post content, and the error reason.
- Failed status on the post itself — the post moves to the Failed tab on the Posts page with the platform's error message attached.
The failure email goes to the workspace owner, not the teammate who created the post. If you wrote and scheduled a post inside someone else's workspace and it failed, ask the workspace owner — they're the one who got the email.
There are no in-app bell notifications for failures today, and no push notifications. Check the Failed tab on the Posts page or ask your workspace owner whether they got a failure email.
Common causes
Most failures fall into two buckets:
- Disconnected or stale account. The platform revoked access, or a teammate reconnected and left this account out. Go to Accounts and reconnect. For Facebook specifically, follow Select all Pages during Facebook OAuth — this is the single biggest source of failures.
- Media the platform rejected. Each platform has its own rules for image size, video codec, aspect ratio, and duration. Check the error message on the failed post for specifics, then shrink, re-encode, or swap the file and retry.
The error message on the failed post is the most useful signal. It comes straight from the platform's API, translated into human-readable English where PostFast recognizes the error code.
Still stuck?
Email [email protected] with:
- A screenshot of the failed post inside PostFast (the Failed tab view)
- The platform and account handle you were posting to
- The scheduled or failed time
That's enough for us to look up the raw platform response in the logs and tell you exactly what went wrong.
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