There are three general situations where one will see a status of pending cancel for an order. I’ll detail those, but first, canceling (ie deleting) an order is in all cases simply a request to cancel an order. To verify an order has actually been cancelled the order status should subsequently be checked and will typically be pending cancel, cancelled or filled (if the order could not be cancelled). It’s not uncommon for an order to be in a pending cancel state for seconds or minutes or longer.
The primary reason one sees pending cancel orders is when an order is cancelled during non-market hours. Alpaca forwards the request to the execution partner who has the order, but many of these partners only accept orders and cancelations during market hours or at most limited hours. Orders cancelled after market hours therefore often remain in a pending cancel state until the following market open.
A second reason for pending cancel orders is simply because some orders cannot be canceled.There isn’t a state of not cancelled (unfortunately) so these orders simply stay as pending cancel until they fill or expire. An example is NASDAQ orders being executed at open. If within a few minutes before open these orders cannot be cancelled. One could see orders with pending cancel for minutes, or longer, in this case.
There are however times which an order fails to get updated. They may have been in a pending cancel state and then either filled or expired but the status simply wasn’t updated. This isn’t normal behavior but can happen for example as a result of a system outage. These orders need to be researched for actual state and manually updated.
As with all account or order specific issues an email to support@alpaca.markets will get it resolved. If there are orders which you feel are ‘stuck’ in pending cancel simply send our support team a request to look into them. They will resolve the issue in a timely manner.