# Cylc kill failing within event handler **URL:** \ **Category:** Cylc Support\ **Created:** [April 6, 2024, 2:57am UTC](https://cylc.discourse.group/t/cylc-kill-failing-within-event-handler/934 "2024-04-06T02:57:24Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 4
**Author:** ![srennie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8edcca/32.png) [@srennie](https://cylc.discourse.group/u/srennie)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2024, 12:03am UTC](https://cylc.discourse.group/t/cylc-kill-failing-within-event-handler/934/4 "2024-04-08T00:03:36Z")
Hi Hilary, thanks for clarifying. The point of cylc workflow-state is that I was copying [Killing and resubmitting jobs that will never run - Cylc / Cylc Support - Cylc Workflow Engine](https://cylc.discourse.group/t/killing-and-resubmitting-jobs-that-will-never-run/165). I think it forces the workflow to wait until the task status is resolved? otherwise the release command might occur before the task is killed and becomes held - if this still occurs in cylc8? I haven’t got any more information about why the job kill failed. In fact, since we had a few system issues over the weekend, I had a lot of jobs hit the submission timeout and get successfully killed (good timing to test my script?!) so I haven’t even had a repeat of the kill failure. Maybe I was unlucky in that the very first time it ran in a “real” workflow, there was some problem that cause the kill failure. Last week I was using a test suite, but even with a PT1S submission timeout, my jobs would usually begin before the kill command was issued - although I guess it just killed a running job instead of a queued job. That did seem to work, so I transferred the handler to my real workflow, where I promptly got the failure above. The only difference I could think of is that the kill failure was for a job in a held state in PBS, not queued or running. Though qdel should still work in that case. --- _[View the full topic](https://cylc.discourse.group/t/cylc-kill-failing-within-event-handler/934)._