Copilot Coding Agent intermittently gets HTTP 403 when pushing — failures occur in clusters across unrelated tasks

[NathanVeal]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Copilot Agent Mode

Body

We are experiencing an intermittent issue with GitHub Copilot Coding Agent where the agent successfully completes its work and creates local commits, but then fails when attempting to push the resulting branch back to GitHub.

The push fails with HTTP 403. A typical error is:

MCP server 'engine-tools': Git error: git push --set-upstream origin HEAD failed
error: RPC failed; HTTP 403 curl 22 The requested URL returned error: 403
send-pack: unexpected disconnect while reading sideband packet
fatal: the remote end hung up unexpectedly
Everything up-to-date

The agent subsequently reports that the commits were created successfully but could not be pushed from its environment.

This does not appear to be a repository permissions or branch protection issue:

• The same Copilot Coding Agent setup successfully pushes branches most of the time.
• Successful and failed tasks occur against the same GitHub organization/repositories and configuration.
• Approximately 80% of our agent sessions complete and push normally.
• Retrying an affected task, including starting a new agent session, frequently continues to result in the same 403.
• Most importantly, we have now noticed that the failures occur in clusters. Multiple completely unrelated Coding Agent tasks have started failing with the same HTTP 403 within minutes of each other, while tasks outside those periods push successfully.

For example, today we had separate tickets/tasks fail within a few minutes of one another with the same push problem.

This makes it appear that there may be an intermittent issue with the credentials/authorization being provisioned to Copilot Coding Agent sessions, or another GitHub-side service involved in agent pushes.

We are on a paid GitHub Team organization and I am the organization owner.

I raised this with GitHub Support over two weeks ago, including the full error and reproduction details, and followed up again last week because it is blocking our development work. I am disgusted that I have still received no response. The ticket number is 4676995.

Has anyone else experienced this behaviour with Copilot Coding Agent and how to solve it?

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[NathanVeal]

Perhaps someone at Github Support can just reply to my support ticket instead that has been open for more than 2 weeks!! Ticket 4676995

[xtellurian]

We see this issue too.

[NathanVeal]

And yet Github continue to ignore this ticket, my support request and instead happily continue deducting AI credits for failed tasks that are caused by their bugs, not through my poor prompts...

I've found that PRs created using GPT-5.6-Luna (High) seem to work consistently, so far.

[NathanVeal]

THIS IS STILL AN ISSUE! HOW IS NO ONE AT GITHUB REPLYING TO THE SUPPORT TICKET OR THE THREAD!...