Clipboard paste hangs application for 30s I'm on MacOS Catalina 10.15.3 (Darwin 19.3.0). My Mac frequently gets into a state where every attempt to paste from the system clipboard freezes the application I'm pasting in to for about 30s, meaning I see a "beachball" when hovering over that application, but can still use other applications.

It also happens with pbcopy/pbpaste:

echo foo | pbcopy
time pbpaste

real 0m30.031s
user 0m0.226s
sys  0m0.202s


It takes almost exactly 30s every time. Note that there is also no output from pbpaste.

I can temporarily resolve it by running rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist &amp;&amp; killall Finder, but the issue returns within minutes. Rebooting does not help.

How can I resolve this?
Open the Terminal application, found in /Applications/Utilities/
Type the following command exactly:

killall pboard

Hit Return


This will terminate and relaunch the pboard process, which is the clipboard daemon for Mac OS. This should resolve your issue.