Cursor Chat Fails with “Invalid Time Zone: Etc/Unknown” on macOS (Remote SSH)

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Hi Anas!

This is a known bug on our side — a few other users have reported the same error on Windows and Docker/Linux environments. Cursor’s server doesn’t properly validate the timezone string sent from the client, so when the system reports “Etc/Unknown”, it crashes instead of falling back to UTC.

Since you’re using Remote SSH, the timezone is likely being resolved from the remote host’s environment, not your local macOS. Even if timedatectl or date shows UTC on the remote, the Node.js runtime Cursor uses may resolve it differently if the remote host is missing proper timezone data.

A few things to try on the remote host:

  1. Install tzdata if it’s a minimal Linux installation:

    sudo apt-get install -y tzdata
    sudo ln -fs /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /etc/localtime
    echo "UTC" | sudo tee /etc/timezone
    sudo dpkg-reconfigure -f noninteractive tzdata

    (Adjust for your package manager if not Debian/Ubuntu.)

  2. Set TZ in your remote shell profile (~/.bashrc or ~/.profile):

    export TZ=UTC

  3. Fully restart Cursor (quit entirely, not just reload window) after making these changes, so the Remote SSH extension host picks up the new timezone.

You can verify by opening Developer Tools (Help > Toggle Developer Tools) on the remote connection and running in the Console:

new Intl.DateTimeFormat('en-US', { timeZone: Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone })

If this throws an error, the timezone data still isn’t set up correctly on the remote.

A server-side fix is in the works so this won’t crash regardless of what the OS reports. Let me know if any of the above helps!