To unstick the pipeline immediately, disable Nx Cloud for the run with the --no-cloud CLI flag or the NX_NO_CLOUD=true environment variable. To permanently decouple, edit nx.json: switch the default tasks runner from nx-cloud back to nx/tasks-runners/default and remove the accessToken and url options. Then investigate the Nx Cloud outage or token issue separately instead of letting it block every pipeline.

Context: Stack Overflow #78242481 (accepted answer, 4 votes): a GitLab pipeline that worked for weeks suddenly hangs with NX Took longer than 3 seconds to hear from heartbeat process. The accepted answer identifies the Nx Cloud task runner as the culprit and gives both a temporary and a permanent way to decouple from it.