Podcasts Connect feed fetch stuck on 'Processing' for Substack-hosted show

Podcasts Connect feed fetch stuck on "Processing" for four days — Substack-hosted show

My show's feed has not been fetched by Apple since Monday 31 August. The "Last Update" timestamp in Podcasts Connect is frozen at 10:42 AM that day and shows "Processing..." indefinitely. I have clicked Refresh many times over four days. The fetch initiates and never completes.

Because nothing is being fetched, two problems are stuck in the catalogue:

1. A duplicate entry for one episode, appearing twice under different dates. My feed contains it once. Podcasts Connect itself shows it once.
2. Per-episode artwork not rendering across most episodes, despite valid itunes:image tags on every item.

What I have ruled out:

• The feed validates clean at episode level across all 15 episodes (Castos RSS Feed Health Report).
• The same feed renders correctly on Spotify — no duplicate, all artwork present.
• Podcasts Connect's own backend shows correct data. The problem is between the fetch and the storefront.

The one outstanding validator error is a byte-range request failure against the feed URL itself. My host (Substack) has filed an engineering report on it. I don't know whether that is causing Apple's fetch to stall, but the timing fits.

Background: I migrated hosting from Buzzsprout to Substack in late August, updating the feed URL directly in Podcasts Connect rather than creating a new show, so ratings and reviews are intact and I'm reluctant to touch the connection now.

I have filed three reports through Podcasts Connect Contact Us since 1 September, including debug data collected via pcast://debug as per Apple's documentation. No response to any of them.

Two questions for anyone here:

• Has anyone else on Substack hosting seen the fetch stall like this? Trying to establish whether it's my show or the host.
• Is there any route to Apple podcast support that gets a response? Four days with an episode publishing has me stuck.