Pause and resume a campaign from an agent

You pause or resume a campaign by calling the public campaign routes. You do not delete exchange objects to stop spend.

REST is POST /campaign/:id/pause, POST /campaign/:id/resume, and POST /campaign/:id/activate. CLI and MCP wrap the same routes. A whole-campaign pause or resume syncs the line item and the creative-line-item associations. That association model has been the public path since June 24, 2026. Ordinary iteration should not go back to direct database or exchange writes.

Pause the campaign, or pause one creative

Pause the campaign when you want the buy to stop. Pause one creative association when you want another approved variant to keep serving. The API blocks pause or remove of the final active creative association. Rotate creatives on a live campaign is that rule.

External agents may pause on their own. Activation and resume still wait on creative status, destination status, a recorded exchange creative id, prepaid balance, budget, and targeting. Readiness is a read, not a tight retry loop.

Daily-cap pause is not a failure

A campaign on a fixed daily budget will spend, then wait. auto_paused_daily_cap is a healthy enrolled state. It should resume after UTC midnight when balance allows. Do not treat zero running campaigns in the afternoon as a broken loop if the fleet already spent its daily cap.

Resume re-pushes the full daily and lifetime envelope, then clears the intraday pacer's last-pushed slice so the next tick can write the correct slice. If you only remember one resume hazard, remember that one: a stale pacer value can leave the exchange holding a wide-open envelope. Resume day burst, then the slice is the writeup.

Repeated failed resumes use backoff. The snapshot check that catches "the exchange is serving while we think we stopped" still runs every tick. Do not "optimize" that check away.

Prepaid runway vs a paused portfolio is how to read a quiet account.