Disclosed in some examples are systems, methods, devices, and machine-readable mediums to detect and terminate programmable atomic transactions that are stuck in an infinite loop. In order to detect and terminate these transactions, the programmable atomic unit may use an instruction counter that increments each time an instruction is executed during execution of a programmable atomic transaction. If the instruction counter meets or exceeds a threshold instruction execution limit without reaching the termination instruction, the programmable atomic transaction may be terminated, all resources used (e.g., memory locks) may be freed, and a response may be sent to a calling processor.