Error messages

We're experiencing high demand right now. Please try again in a few moments.

We're experiencing high demand right now. Please try again in a few moments.

Cursor shows this under a bold High Load heading when a chat or agent request is refused:

High Load
We're experiencing high demand right now. Please try again in a few moments.

The wording shifts with the model. If you picked one by name you get "We're experiencing high demand for Kimi K3 right now. Please switch to Auto, another model, or try again in a few moments." Behind both is the same error, which someone pasted in full on the Cursor forum on September 15, 2026:

{"error":"ERROR_RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED","details":{"title":"High Load","detail":"We're experiencing high demand for Kimi K3 right now. Please switch to Auto, another model, or try again in a few moments.","isRetryable":true,"additionalInfo":{},"buttons":[],"planChoices":[]},"isExpected":true}

Lots of people hit it. As of September 25, 2026 the forum has 36 topics with "high load" in the title and 26 more with "high demand" (a title search, so some are duplicates). One July thread ran to 81 posts.

Why does Cursor say High Load?

It's capacity. On a July 16 outage a Cursor staffer called it "a temporary high-demand throttle on our side" with Auto and Cursor Grok 4.5 "hitting capacity". In August another reply said it shows "when Auto is under peak load, so the request gets temporarily rejected server-side", and that it's safe to retry.

The clearest account came on September 17, to a trial user on Cursor 3.20.21 with Cursor Grok 4.6. When demand for a model is above what's available, "some requests get rejected with a High Load message instead of putting everyone into an endless queue, and Free plan traffic is rate-limited first." Staff have also said it's unrelated to your region or to Fast mode being off.

We didn't expect the queue detail. Cursor chose to refuse some requests outright rather than make everyone wait, which is why you get an error instead of a slow reply.

It follows the clock. One staff reply agreed the spikes are worse "when EU and US wake up", and a single model can go down for a while too. Kimi K3 had a capacity problem on September 15 between roughly 20:02 and 20:21 UTC, and Cursor said on September 24 that the underlying fix was rolling out.

How do I get past it?

• Start a new chat. Staff said on September 17 that once a chat hits this limit "it tends to stick to that chat", so pressing Try again in the same one often keeps failing (we'd have guessed the opposite).
• Switch models. If you're on Auto, pick a specific model; if you're on a named one, try another. Users in the July thread got through on Composer 2.5 while Auto was failing.
• Wait and retry. Nothing on your machine needs changing, and Cursor staff say rejected requests aren't billed.
• If it keeps failing, post the Request ID (chat menu, top right, Copy Request ID) on the forum or check status.cursor.com.

"Please upgrade to Pro" on a paid plan

Some versions of the message say "Please upgrade to Pro or try again in a few moments", even to people already on Pro or Ultra. (One Ultra user wrote that Pro felt more like a downgrade.) Cursor staff called that line "incorrect copy" on August 18 and said again on August 26 that you can ignore it. It only means the servers were busy. Your plan hasn't changed.

When it isn't really load

One March 2026 report on Cursor 2.6.19 had the same ERROR_RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED for a different reason. The user's premium requests were at 100%, and Auto was still trying to send the request to a premium model. The staff fix was the same as for a busy server: pick a model by hand. If High Load shows every single time while the forum is quiet, check your usage in Cursor's settings too.