Background Agent stuck on loading with small prompt

Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Background Agent (GitHub, Slack, Web, Linear)

Describe the Bug

When launching a background agent with a very small prompt, the agent remains in the “starting” state and never starts running. This started happening a few hours ago.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Create a background agent with a very small prompt.
  2. Start the agent.
  3. Observe that the agent remains in the “starting” state indefinitely and never starts running.

Expected Behavior

The background agent should start normally and process small prompts quickly instead of remaining in the starting state indefinitely.

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.0.43
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: 8e4da76ad196925accaa169efcae28c45454cce0
Date: 2025-10-30T18:49:27.589Z
Electron: 34.5.8
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.1
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 23.3.0

For AI issues: which model did you use?

GPT5

For AI issues: add Request ID with privacy disabled

bc-a6e268ae-f865-49fa-accb-3cdb72c4640b

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Sometimes - I can sometimes use Cursor

1 Like
2

Please help us Cursor :sob:

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image1168×3748 338 KB

3

Hey, that’s certainly odd that so many agent runs are stuck, but you can try the following to narrow down the issue:

  • Check how many background agents are pending, vs completed ones. I see around 30 pending runs, which can affect new agents.
  • Open the project in a new location (or create a new project) and try running a small background agent.
    • If it works in the new location, the problem is likely specific to the current project.

That said, do you remember how so many agent runs were created in the first place?

5
  • Every single one of our Cloud Agents created via the Background Agents API are getting stuck in pending. We did not change anything on our end to cause them to start getting stuck. None of the cloud agents are complete. Every one becomes pending.
  • Worktrees and local agents run fine.
  • All of these agent runs were indeed created legitimately. It does not appear that agent runs are disappearing. They’re all going to pending.
  • It fails even when creating the Cloud Agent from Cursor app instead of the API endpoint
  • It always gets to the step of “Environment ready” → “Planning next moves” and then gets stuck. It will always title the agent before getting stuck.
6

Hey, thanks for the report. It looks like a server-side issue because:

  • All Cloud Agents are stuck (local agents work fine)
  • There’s a consistent failure at the “Planning next moves” step
  • It started suddenly with no changes on your end

I’ll pass this to the team. They’ll investigate why the Cloud Agent is failing at the planning stage.

In the meantime, if you need to unblock work, worktrees and local agents should continue to function normally, as you noted.

2 Likes
7

Thank you @deanrie! Unfortunately, we would very much appreciate a prompt resolution of this issue, as our automated workflows that use the Cloud Agents cannot exactly be replicated with worktrees and local agents, and so this is holding back our team quite a bit.

1 Like
9

Hi @deanrie, any updates on the situation? This is holding back our team.

10

The team is working on this. Sorry for the inconvenience.

11

+1, here’s another request ID in case another data point is helpful: bc-5272977e-0cf8-43a8-844f-b71abeaab0f3.

Version: 2.0.69 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: 63fcac100bd5d5749f2a98aa47d65f6eca61db30
Date: 2025-11-07T18:21:29.650Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 25.0.0
1 Like
12

I have been facing the same issue as @joeo since last week. At first I thought it was a Slack integration issue but the agents get stuck on web too.

I had already reached out via email but happy to provide more example request IDs if helpful. Looking forward to the cursor team resolving this.

1 Like
13

@joeo @majithiaaarat_eds Cloud agents are working again for me as of today. Can you guys confirm?

14

That’s great @scupit . Yup it is working for me now.

Looked into this more today, I was able to identify the root cause, it wasn’t an issue from cursor. The issue was with the docker file I was using for the “Base Environment” in “Personal Configuration” in settings.

Although it would have been nice for the cloud agent to show the error somewhere instead of getting stuck.

@joeo maybe the personal configuration is an issue for you too?

15

Nice! I was using the default configuration, so they definitely fixed something on their end. What was failing before every time is now working, without any change from me.

16

@majithiaaarat_eds @scupit it is working for us as well! Thank you @deanrie and team for the fix.

1 Like