Fix for Cursor Error: "Failed to run step, exceeded max retries"

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor CLI

Describe the Bug

I recently ran into this error while using Cursor:

An unexpected error occurred on our servers. Please try again, or contact support if the issue persists.
Request ID: fc61e6a2-b5e3-44d9-9ca0-774c081539cd
[internal] Failed to run step, exceeded max retries

The stack trace looked something like this:

runAgentLoop
streamFromAgentBackend
getAgentStreamResponse

At first I thought the problem was with my code, but it actually seems to be related to Cursor’s Agent execution failing internally. After trying several things, here are the fixes that worked.

Steps to Reproduce

In an empty project, no matter what message I send, it always shows the error:

“An unexpected error occurred on our servers. Please try again, or contact support if the issue persists.”

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Version: 2.6.11 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 8c95649f251a168cc4bb34c89531fae7db4bd990
Date: 2026-03-03T18:57:48.001Z (10 hrs ago)
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.6.0
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.0
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
OS: Darwin x64 24.6.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

3

Hey, thanks for the report. This is a known server-side issue that pops up from time to time. Can you try a few things:

  1. Start a new chat with the Agent (don’t continue this one)
  2. Go to Cursor Settings, search for “HTTP/2”, enable Disable HTTP/2, then restart Cursor
  3. Try switching models (for example, from Auto to a specific model like Claude Sonnet 4.6)
  4. If you’re using a VPN or proxy, try without it

By the way, can you reproduce this reliably right now, or was it intermittent? In some previous cases, the error fixed itself because it was a temporary backend issue.

Let me know how it goes.