Clicking "Place order" does not deliver anything by itself. It creates a row in the panel's orders table with a status of "pending" and hands the real work to a background queue — the same request that shows you the order confirmation page returns long before the follower count actually moves.
A queue worker, running continuously in the background, picks up the new order within seconds. If the service is set to auto-sync, the worker calls out to the provider's own API — the wholesale supplier the panel buys the service from — passing along the link or username you submitted and the quantity you paid for. The provider replies with an order ID on their side, which the panel stores against your order so the two systems stay linked.
From there the order status depends entirely on the provider. Most panels, this one included, run a recurring job every few minutes that asks each provider for the current status of every order still in progress. A provider might report "in progress", "partial", "completed", or occasionally "canceled" if something about the link or account made it impossible to fulfil. The panel translates that into the status you see, and — this is the detail most panels get wrong — it never automatically downgrades an order from something like "in progress" back to "pending" just because a provider sent a status word it didn't recognize. That kind of silent backward slide is how orders get stuck forever, and it's one of the first things worth checking if a support ticket ever asks "why is my old order pending again?"
A manual service works differently: no provider call happens automatically, and an admin fulfils the order by hand, then marks it complete themselves. That's normal for niche or custom services a provider doesn't offer, but it means delivery time depends on someone being available, not on server response time.
The "Pending" you see right after ordering, then, isn't a bug — it's the honest state of "we've queued this and are about to hand it to the provider or a human." For most services with decent providers, that window closes in seconds to a couple of minutes. If it doesn't move for hours, that's usually either a provider outage or a link the provider rejected, and checking the order's detail page (or opening a ticket) is the right next step rather than placing a second order on the same link.