Various aspects of the present disclosure generally relate to wireless communication. In some aspects, a user equipment (UE) may transmit a beam failure recovery scheduling request (BFR-SR) to a primary cell or a primary secondary cell base station based at least in part on detecting a beam failure associated with a secondary cell (SCell) link between the UE and an SCell base station. The UE may start a timer based at least in part on transmitting the BFR-SR. The UE may retransmit the BFR-SR based at least in part on the timer expiring prior to the UE receiving a response to acknowledge the BFR-SR and schedule transmission of a medium access control (MAC) control element (MAC-CE) including information to recover from the beam failure and/or the timer expiring prior to the UE transmitting the MAC-CE. Numerous other aspects are provided.