Similar story happened to us just a couple of days ago on an AAward flight on CX from Asia back home. We moved our departure day out one day... took a long time on the phone to do this. Agent kept apologizing but I expressed gratitude as we were extending vacation by 24 hours. Later I called CX to reconfirm tickets were OK... his had gone through... mine was showing "pending"... called AA and found that my ticket was on the dreaded "On request" status. The agent apologized and issued in 2 minutes.

I've had this happen several times on revenue as well as award travel. Sometimes it's a credit card problem. Sometimes it's because award taxes have increased since the original ticketing (I think that's what happened here... CX taxes went from something like $2.50 to $44?)... sometimes they just don't know why the tickets pend but they do.

So always look for the E-ticket confirmation email.