Midjourney not working? Here's how you can try to fix it

Midjourney, for all its popularity as an AI image generator, is something of a strange beast. You can only access it via Discord — a gaming-focused chat platform — and it’s hosted entirely on remote servers. If something goes wrong it’s even less clear than usual what you can do to fix it, if anything. Thankfully, there are ways you can address some Midjourney problems, though you’ll probably detect a common theme.

How to fix Midjourney not working

As you’d expect there’s variety of glitches you might encounter, and in some cases there may be multiple solutions. Here we’ll list some of the more common error messages and the solutions to try for each of them.

• “Failed to process your command.” This is one of the most vague errors, so you’ll have to experiment with various options. The best may be simply waiting a while, anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes, since Midjourney’s servers are probably overloaded. You might also try leaving the Discord server during that time and/or restarting your Discord app. Another possible answer is connecting through a VPN, but we wouldn’t count on Midjourney treating you any differently.
• “The application did not respond.” You’ll likely have to wait and try your command again, but it may also be worth updating your Discord client. There’s also a possibility that Discord and/or Midjourney’s servers are down or otherwise having problems, in which case you could be waiting an hour or longer instead of a few minutes.
• No response from “/imagine”. Oddly enough, you may sometimes need to double-space after /imagine to get a prompt to register. That’s not intended, naturally.
• “Job encountered an error, likely due to lack of memory.” Despite what this message implies, what’s actually going on is that you’ve specified a width (-w) or height (-h) value that isn’t a multiple of 64, or alternately is above 1024 pixels. While you can change aspect ratios, the maximum 1:1 resolution without upscaling is 1024 x 1024.
• “Invalid link. Could not validate this link. Please try again later.” You’ll only see this one if you try to use an image URL as part of a prompt. If you’re not uploading images directly to the Midjourney Bot, make sure any outside URL is publicly accessible. Moreover, only JPG/JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WEBP files are supported, and the number of URLs you can use may be limited by the Midjourney model version. We’d suggest using JPG or PNG files to be absolutely sure things will work.
• “Interaction failed.” In many cases Midjourney will still generate images if you see this, you just have to be patient. If you’re trying to submit requests in direct messages (DMs) with the Midjourney Bot and getting nowhere, you may have to change Discord security settings to allow DMs — some people turn them off to avoid harassment.
• “Server has reached limit of active threads.” This one of the few cases in which the error message is genuinely helpful. Quite simply it means you’ll have to wait for activity to cool down on the Discord server, at least if you’re inputting commands in a public channel. You may be able to get around this by switching to DMs with the Midjourney Bot.