Why My Cursor Completions Kept Failing and How I Fixed It

I use Cursor IDE every day as an AI developer, and recently I hit a wall: my completions were failing more than 90% of the time. The status said everything was fine, but clearly something was wrong. After hours of digging, I found the root causes and reliable fixes. Let me walk you through how I got back on track.

The Core Problem I Encountered

It started subtly. My completion requests in Cursor IDE began failing constantly. The dashboard wouldn’t load, or it showed old data. I kept seeing errors like ‘VPN connection not available’ and messages about model provider issues.

After a few days, it became unbearable. Coding felt impossible, and my frustration was mounting.

My Initial Troubleshooting Steps

I started with the usual suspects. First, I tried switching models: o4-mini, 3.7 sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro. No luck.

Then I focused on my network:

• Reconnected to my WAN and tried different access points
• Considered regional data center loads – peak times can really hit AI providers hard

Still, the issues continued. Completions failed at random, and the dashboard lagged like crazy.

The Breakthrough in Diagnosis

I dug deeper and learned a trick: disabling privacy mode temporarily. Here’s what happened:

• With privacy off, I captured a request ID for debugging. That revealed connection problems
• I noticed indexing issues or full resets could cause cascading errors, including that ‘VPN’ message
• I realized often the problem wasn’t Cursor at all. It was external factors, like model provider downtimes (Anthropic, for example). But Cursor’s status didn’t show these

This was the key: the failures usually came from dependencies, not Cursor itself.

The Solutions That Finally Worked

With these insights, I tried a few practical fixes:

• Starting a new chat session: This reset the model behavior and fixed most completion errors
• Waiting out temporary outages: Especially during off-peak hours
• Keeping privacy enabled: I only turned it off briefly for debugging, then turned it back on for security

After a system reset, everything stabilized. I was finally able to work efficiently again.

What I Now Do Differently

My big lesson? Always check external providers first. And don’t underestimate a simple reset.

For you: Keep an eye on model status independently. Start a new session when things get glitchy. These steps can save you a lot of downtime and keep your AI tools humming.