Q&A
Q&AHow do you safely recover a Terraform state lock after a crashed job?
Verify the lock holder is truly gone and preserve state before force-unlocking.
Read the concise answer
Inspect lock metadata, backend state, and the pipeline that acquired it; confirm no apply is still running. Preserve a state backup and compare cloud reality before force-unlocking the specific stale lock. Then run and review a plan. Force-unlocking a live writer can permit competing state updates and corrupt tracking.