Background Agents Always Failing with "Something Went Wrong"

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Background Agent (GitHub, Slack, Web, Linear)

Describe the Bug

Starting about 1 hour ago, all of our Background Agents fail with “Something with wrong.”

Steps to Reproduce

It does not matter whether we start them from the website or within Cursor.

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.7.29 (user setup)
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: 5de1e0201c451e9b2865f731faa1e2d4bd875e20
Date: 2025-10-02T03:40:46.214Z
Electron: 34.5.8
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.1
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26100

For AI issues: which model did you use?

claude-4.5-sonnet MAX

Additional Information

We are on the team plan, and we are no near our usage limit. We tend to spin up many Background Agents, so perhaps its an internal rate limit issue?

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

HI @joeo and thank you for the bug report. I will share the issue with the team.

1 Like

Could you add the bc id as text into the thread?

Hi @condor, here’s a couple:

  • bc-8666123d-2c4e-4d70-9bf1-9c6fdb83f83c
  • bc-f392d675-f994-4642-b052-4ca7679571ec
  • bc-5970d448-2131-4a83-9a52-6de04ad67ae7
  • bc-8049080b-1b54-499d-a6ab-91bd0d10678a
1 Like

Got the same problem, background agents keep erroring out.

1 Like

Hi @joeo and @romil8jain , any chance you have a custom environment.json and/or Dockerfile set up? (@romil8jain do you mind sending over some bcIds as well for us to try to diagnose the issue?)

We’re seeing that the VMs in the linked bcIds aren’t launching successfully, but it doesn’t seem to be a widespread issue across users/teams.

Hi @joshma, we have a custom environment.json but not a custom Docker image. Here it is:

{

  "user": "ubuntu",

  "install": "./.cursor/install.sh",

  "start": "./.cursor/start.sh", 

  "terminals": \[

    {

      "name": "dev-server",

      "command": "npm run dev:emulators",

      "description": "Runs the Next.js development server with hot reloading and connected to the Firebase emulators"

    },

    {

      "name": "functions-emulators", 

      "command": "npm run functions:serve",

      "description": "Starts Firebase emulators with functions watching"

    },

    {

      "name": "watch-callables",

      "command": "npm run watch-callables", 

      "description": "Watches Firebase callable functions and regenerates boilerplate"

    },

    {

      "name": "anvil-blockchain",

      "command": "npm run anvil:serve",

      "description": "Runs local Anvil blockchain for Web3 development"

    }

  \]

}

I do want to reiterate that Background Agents were working correctly before, and we did not make any changes to environment.json between the time the agents were running successfully and when they started failing.

EDIT: Background Agents have started working for us again roughly 3 hours ago.

1 Like

Thanks @joeo for the info - and glad to hear it’s working again. We’re going to continue investigating to ensure it doesn’t happen again!

1 Like

Hi Joshma, I do have a Dockerfile set up in the project. Gets stuck at the following step:

Allocating resources for this agent (request id: bc-6f0f71c2-9238-4fbc-baba-f8663e031cb4) …

__

Version: 1.7.28

VSCode Version: 1.99.3

Commit: adb0f9e3e4f184bba7f3fa6dbfd72ad0ebb8cfd0

Date: 2025-10-01T02:45:21.769Z (2 days ago)

Electron: 34.5.8

Chromium: 132.0.6834.210

Node.js: 20.19.1

V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0

OS: Darwin arm64 24.0.0

1 Like

I tried it again this morning and its working for me now.

1 Like

Hi folks, we identified and fixed a race condition in our how we were provisioning the agent VMs. Apologies for the issue and thanks again for reporting it in!

2 Likes

Just wanted to update, we fixed it Fr afternoon. Thank you all for confirming.

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