Cowork session freezes during processing, leads to app crash (beach ball + force quit)

[razielpanic]

Description

A Cowork session stalled during the processing phase (agent was actively working, no user input expected). The UI showed a blinking cursor with no response for an extended period, then the entire Claude Desktop app became unresponsive (spinning beach ball). Had to force quit the app.

Environment

• macOS (Apple Silicon)
• Claude Desktop (latest as of 2026-02-10)
• Cowork mode

Steps to Reproduce

1. Open a Cowork session with a project that has multiple MCP servers connected (3+)
2. Give the agent a task that requires reading several project files and making multiple MCP calls in sequence
3. Agent begins processing — reading files, calling MCP tools
4. During processing: UI shows blinking cursor, then stops responding entirely
5. Spinning beach ball appears
6. App must be force quit

Expected Behavior

Agent completes processing and returns a response, or gracefully shows an error if resources are exhausted.

Actual Behavior

• Processing stalls (blinking cursor, no output)
• App becomes completely unresponsive
• Spinning beach ball
• Force quit required
• No error message or crash report shown

Additional Context

• The session involved multiple MCP servers (local and extension-based) being called during the processing phase
• Multiple file reads were happening as part of the agent's boot/setup routine
• This may be related to [BUG] Cowork VM heartbeat failures cause repeated SIGKILL — 4GB VM insufficient for MCP servers + plugins #22715 (VM memory limits in Cowork)
• The session had been running for ~10-15 minutes before the stall

[github-actions]

Found 3 possible duplicate issues:

1. [BUG] Cowork VM heartbeat failures cause repeated SIGKILL — 4GB VM insufficient for MCP servers + plugins #22715
2. [BUG] Co-work VM causes daily system-wide memory exhaustion - crashes all Electron apps #23334
3. Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle that severely degrades performance #22543

This issue will be automatically closed as a duplicate in 3 days.

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🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[razielpanic]

Looks like a different issue to #22543 since this was a freeze, but the other 2 closed as duplicates seemed like better reports on this same issue

[github-actions]

Closing for now — inactive for too long. Please open a new issue if this is still relevant.