Connection handling during in-flight wifi

[aathan (AA)]

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

I suspect that Cursor’s connection handling can be improved so that corporate users on in-flight wifi can continue to work while traveling. My observations are consistent with either my company’s security posture or Cursor’s own connection handling could be improved:

E.g.:

• Does Cursor always set keepalive on outbound TCP connections & requests to inferencing APIs? This would help detect transport level failures way sooner
• Does Cursor have any settings I can tweak in order to retry connections or restart inference runs more quickly and/or more often? I’d set those differently when in flight.
• Can Cursor’s state/interactions with upstream servers be restartable so that usability on unreliable or slow networks dramatically improves?

Steps to Reproduce

Use Cursor in-flight, experience lots of:

Connection failed. If the problem persists, please check your internet connection or VPN…

Expected Behavior

More reliable AI connections on unreliable networks.

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.3.35 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: cf8353edc265f5e46b798bfb276861d0bf3bf120
Date: 2026-01-13T07:39:18.564Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.6.0

For AI issues: add Request ID with privacy disabled

Request ID: 5a9b9d2c-140a-4cd1-8ebe-55579775351d

Additional Information

Southwest in-flight t-mobile based wifi + security postures of my firm

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

[Colin]

Hey @aathan! Thanks for raising this.

To be honest, if you’re on the ground and turn off your Wi-Fi mid-session then turn it back on, you’ll hit similar issues with the agent. So it’s not just in-flight wifi being finicky!

We’re actively working on making sessions more idempotent and resilient to network hiccups. It’s important to us. Right now, I don’t think there’s anything specific you could tune for a better experience in the skies.

[aathan (AA)]

Great. Glad you have eyes on this. It would be helpful to at least have a “Low Data Mode” button so that the interactive updates in the chat window, and other places where less data could be transferred to improve reliability, voluntarily, would be great. In low data mode, I could imagine still getting some kind of progress bar but not as much text or as much frequently updated. It’d probably be helpful for cursor’s comms layer to measure the effective data transfer rate (e.g., by comparing the receive timestamp and size of data to the send timestamp, for example) of a connection in order to detect extremely low data rates in order to equate that to a failed connection so that this information can affect connection handling heuristics.