Troubleshoot a pending number or Sender ID
Two surfaces gate on regulatory approval before they carry traffic: a phone number waiting on a compliance profile, and an alphanumeric Sender ID waiting on a country registration. Until the gate clears, sends to that surface stay blocked. This page walks each status to its cause and to the fix you can run yourself.Compliance posture is yours to configure — Orbit gives you the
controls and defaults them open. Final approval of a number or
Sender ID always comes from the carrier or regulator, not from the
platform, so lead time in this page is an expectation, not a
guarantee.
Map the status to its meaning
Phone numbers — a number atpending_compliance is blocked from
sending or receiving until an approved compliance profile is attached
to it. Orbit re-submits the profile to the carrier and a carrier
webhook flips the number to active. See the full flow in
Number Lifecycle.
Sender IDs — a country entry at pending means the registration
was submitted and is awaiting review by the regulator or carriers in
that country. approved means traffic may flow; rejected or
expired block traffic until you re-submit. The four states are
documented on Sender-ID Registration.
Fix a pending number
Attach an approved compliance profile to the number:active when the carrier accepts the profile. If
you do not yet hold an approved profile, create one from your KYC
documents first, then attach it.
Fix a pending or rejected Sender ID
Re-submit the registration packet with the documents the destination country requires — the per-country sender types, registration flag, and required documents are in Country Compliance Requirements. Re-submitting the same Sender ID is an idempotent upsert: countries you already holdapproved keep their approval, and countries that
were rejected or expired return to pending for a fresh review.
See
Sender-ID Registration.
Read the rejection reason
For numbers, check the Numbers page in the dashboard — the row for apending_compliance number shows what the carrier flagged.
For Sender IDs, open Settings → Compliance → Sender IDs in the
dashboard. Each country entry carries its status and the notes the
reviewer left; a rejected entry names what to fix before you
re-submit. Team members with access to the admin review queue can
also see the packet notes there.
Country outliers that surface explicit error codes
Some markets block unregistered alphanumeric senders at send time with a specific error code:
India is a separate regime. Sender IDs there are DLT “Headers”
paired with DLT content templates — sends without an approved DLT
template return
MESSAGING_IN_DLT_TEMPLATE_REQUIRED, and a body or
header that does not match the registered template returns
MESSAGING_IN_DLT_CONTENT_MISMATCH. Register your Principal Entity,
Headers, and templates on a DLT portal, then record them in Orbit.
See DLT-India Onboarding.
Lead time and when to escalate
Approval lead time is set by the regulator or carrier, not by Orbit. A few examples from the registry:- Many EU markets clear within days; some take a couple of weeks.
- Brazil and Singapore routinely take days to weeks.
- India DLT artifacts clear on the registrar’s timeline, then mirror into Orbit as the registrar updates their status.
- A number has stayed
pending_compliancefor more than two weeks after the profile was attached. - A Sender-ID entry has stayed
pendingbeyond the lead time the country registry publishes. - A
rejectedentry gives a reason you cannot resolve with the documents you hold.
Related references
- Sender-ID Registration — the registration endpoints and status lifecycle.
- Country Compliance Requirements — per-country sender rules and required documents.
- DLT-India Onboarding — India’s separate DLT regime.
- Number Lifecycle — the
pending_complianceflow and the attach-profile endpoint. - Error Codes — the full sender-registration error-code table.
- Compliance Posture FAQ — the mental model for “pending until an external approval lands.”