Your HeyGen video has been "Processing" for 45 minutes. Or an avatar keeps coming out with garbled audio. Or the API is throwing 503s and you're not sure if that's your code or their servers.
HeyGen's failure modes are component-specific in a way that makes troubleshooting less obvious. Avatar generation, Video Translate, and the API can each break independently. The fix for a stuck video depends on which system is actually having issues. Here's how to figure that out and what to do about it.
Step 1: Identify Which Component Is Involved
Go to status.heygen.com and look at the individual component rows — not just the top-level summary.
The components that matter:
- Video generation — avatar rendering, the core product
- Video Translate — AI dubbing and translation (separate infrastructure)
- API — the developer API for programmatic access
- Web application — the browser interface
- Authentication — login and account access
A partial failure where video generation is degraded but the rest of the platform is fine is common. The top-level status banner might say "degraded performance" while the specific component you need is actually down. Look at the rows.
If everything shows green and you're still having problems — it's a local issue, not a platform outage. Different problem, different fix.
Fix: Video Stuck on "Processing"
This is the most common HeyGen problem. The video submits successfully, appears in your queue, and then doesn't progress.
When the status page shows an active generation incident:
Wait it out or use Synthesia for anything urgent. Queue backups during a generation infrastructure incident resolve when HeyGen restores capacity — usually within a few hours. Don't keep canceling and resubmitting during an active incident; it just adds more jobs to an already overloaded queue.
When the status page shows green:
Cancel the stuck job and resubmit it. Sometimes a job enters a corrupted state that a fresh submission bypasses. This works more often than it should.
Try a different avatar. If you're using one specific avatar model, switch to a different one for the test submission. Occasionally a specific avatar model has degraded while others are fine — the status page doesn't always break this down at the per-avatar level.
Simplify the generation. If your script is long or you're using a custom avatar with uploaded footage, try a shorter test generation with a standard avatar first. If that works, the issue may be complexity-related or specific to your custom avatar's processing.
Check your credit balance. On some account configurations, a credit exhaustion doesn't throw an obvious error — the job just hangs. Confirm you have credits available in your account dashboard before assuming it's a platform issue.
Fix: Avatar Generating with Bad Quality
Distorted audio, wrong lip sync, facial artifacts, or inconsistent motion — these quality problems aren't always outage-related.
If one specific avatar looks wrong but others work fine:
This is usually a partial model issue or a problem with your custom avatar configuration. Try switching to a different avatar to confirm. If other avatars generate correctly, report the specific failing avatar to HeyGen support — this is useful feedback for them and they may be able to fix the avatar model.
If all avatars look degraded:
Check the generation infrastructure component on status.heygen.com. Widespread quality degradation across avatars usually maps to an inference infrastructure issue — wait for it to resolve.
If quality is consistently bad across sessions and nothing has changed:
Review your script formatting. HeyGen avatars respond poorly to certain text patterns: bullet points, special characters, all-caps, and very long run-on sentences all affect delivery quality. Rewrite the script with shorter sentences and natural punctuation. Add commas where you'd naturally pause when speaking. Test with a 2-3 sentence clip before running a full generation.
Fix: Video Translate Problems
Video Translate runs on separate infrastructure from avatar generation. It can be broken while everything else works, and vice versa.
Bad lip sync or audio quality in translated output:
The most common cause is an uncorrected auto-generated transcript. HeyGen auto-transcribes your source video, but it makes errors — especially on names, technical terms, or accented speech. Always review and correct the transcript before confirming the translation. A bad transcript produces bad translation output, no matter how good the platform is working.
Other things to check:
- Source video should have a single speaker, clean audio, minimal background noise. Multiple speakers or overlapping audio causes translation artifacts.
- If your source video upload keeps failing, try re-exporting it as a standard H.264 MP4 before uploading. Unusual codec or container formats can cause silent processing failures.
Translation jobs stuck or not completing:
Check the Video Translate component row on status.heygen.com specifically. If it shows degraded, the fix is waiting — there's nothing to do on your end. If it shows green, try canceling and resubmitting the job.
Fix: API Errors (503 vs. 429)
If you're using HeyGen via the REST API and getting error responses, the HTTP status code tells you what's actually happening.
HTTP 503 (Service Unavailable): The API layer is degraded or temporarily down. This is a platform issue. Check status.heygen.com under the API component. If it shows degraded, add exponential backoff to your retry logic (start with a 5-second delay, double with each retry) and reduce your request rate. Do not hammer the endpoint — you'll make the problem worse and risk rate limiting on top of the outage.
HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests): You've hit your API rate limit. This isn't an outage — it's a quota issue. Back off regardless of what the status page shows. Check the Retry-After header in the response for how long to wait before retrying.
Timeouts on video submission endpoints: Often maps to generation infrastructure being degraded even when the API status shows green. If submissions are timing out consistently but the API component is operational, check the video generation component specifically.
Successful submission but video never completes: The generation queue is backed up. The job was accepted but processing resources aren't available. See the "Video Stuck on Processing" section above.
When It's a Full Platform Outage
A full outage — where nobody can log in or do anything — is less common than partial component failures. But it happens.
Signs you're dealing with a platform-wide problem, not a component issue:
- Can't log in at all
- Dashboard won't load
- All video types fail regardless of avatar or template
- API returning 5xx errors for every endpoint
In that case, check status.heygen.com and subscribe to updates so you know when it resolves. If you need to produce video urgently, Synthesia is the most capable substitute — similar avatar video workflow, similar output quality.
When to Contact Support
HeyGen support is worth contacting in these situations:
- A specific avatar model is consistently producing bad output and the status page is green (share the video ID and the avatar name)
- Credits were deducted for a video that failed to generate (HeyGen's policy is to refund credits for failed generations — share the video ID from your history)
- You're getting error messages that don't match anything in their documentation
For platform-wide incidents, support will confirm the issue but can't resolve it faster than the engineering team. For those, watching the status page is more useful than filing a ticket.
For issues that are more about feature configuration than platform failures — robotic avatar delivery, script formatting, account setup — the HeyGen not working guide covers those in detail. If you're evaluating whether HeyGen's pricing makes sense for your video production volume, the HeyGen pricing breakdown covers what you actually get at each tier.
