Copilot Failing to work on Assigned issue

[shivampundit]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Copilot in GitHub

Body

Hello,

For the past week, our entire organization has been unable to utilize the Copilot Coding/Workspace Agent when automating workflows. Specifically, when we assign a GitHub issue to Copilot via MCP (Model Context Protocol) or the GraphQL API, the assignment mutation itself is successful, but the Copilot agent immediately crashes when attempting to initiate the work.

Error Message Received (via UI/Agent output):
The agent encountered an error and was unable to start working on this issue: Please try again later, or contact support if the problem persists. (Request id: A000:3E7F70:26EEE1A:9003BF1:6A322642)

Steps to Reproduce:
Authenticate and initiate an API request via MCP or GraphQL to assign a specific GitHub issue to the Copilot Agent.
Observe that the API request completes successfully (e.g., HTTP 200 / successful mutation) and the issue reflects the assignment.
Observe the Copilot Agent's state: It fails to bootstrap the workspace/task.
The agent throws the error: unable to start working on this issue with the request ID mentioned above.
Previously we have observed this issue but after 2 days it was resolved and working on similar issue assignments

Duration of issue: ~1 week (ongoing)

Feedback & Impact:
Because the API assignment succeeds but the worker fails asynchronously, this breaks our automated triaging and coding pipelines. We have no visibility into why the worker node is crashing. It is unclear if this is a sudden token permission scope issue (e.g., the API token can assign the issue, but the backend agent lacks the scope to read the repository to start working), or a backend degradation in the Copilot Workspace routing.

Questions:
Has there been a recent change to the required OAuth/PAT scopes for API-driven Copilot Agent assignments?
Is the Request id: A000:3E7F70:26EEE1A:9003BF1:6A322642 indicative of a rate limit, a repository context size limit, or an internal server error (500)?
Are there any known issues with MCP integrations failing to hand off the required context to the Copilot backend workers?

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