The ninth factor is related to gently stopping the application. The application can be shut down for many reasons (new version available, updates, reload, and restart), and a twelve-factor application must be capable of handling shutdowns gracefully, which means completing the running tasks without accepting new ones. Once every task is completed (aborted or terminated), the application will shut down.

These kinds of functionalities are provided through different frameworks, available for the most-used programming languages and runtimes.