Pausing an agent

Every agent in the list has a Live switch. Turn it off and the agent stops answering; turn it back on and it resumes. Nothing else about the agent changes — it keeps its phone numbers, its workflow, its knowledge base and its history.

Use it when an agent is behaving badly on a live line and you need it to stop now, or when a seasonal agent should be silent between campaigns.

What “paused” actually stops

All four ways a call can reach an agent honour the switch:

Route	What happens when paused
Inbound call to an assigned number	Rejected at the carrier. No workflow run is created and no concurrency slot is taken.
Inbound over SIP / ARI	The channel is hung up before a slot is acquired.
Test call from the API	POST /telephony/initiate-call returns 409 with a message naming the pause.
A running campaign	Each queued row is marked refused with reason agent_not_live.

Campaign rows refused this way are terminal, not retried. Retrying would change nothing until somebody turns the agent back on, and it would pollute the failure signal the circuit breaker uses to spot a genuinely bad carrier. Turn the agent on and re-queue if you want those calls placed.

Paused is not archived

They are different things and they are deliberately separate controls.

• Paused — the agent is part of your working set. It appears in the list, you can edit and test it, and it is not answering.
• Archived — the agent is out of the working set entirely. It moves to the Archived section, and it does not answer calls either.

Archiving something already implies it should not take calls, so archived agents are refused by the same check. A single field would have made “hide it” and “silence it” the same gesture, and you would not have been able to see a paused agent in order to unpause it.

Who can do it

Any member of the organization. Pausing is reversible and is part of running an agent — an operator who has to find an admin before stopping a misbehaving agent will pull the phone number instead, which is far harder to undo.

Through the API

curl -X PUT https://<your-host>/api/v1/workflows/42/live \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $DECIBYL_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"is_live": false}'

The response is the agent, including its new is_live. Agents are live by default, and every agent that existed before this switch did stayed live when it shipped — nothing went quiet on deploy.