Frequent "refresh credentials prompt" multiple times an hour

[voidquest]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Visual Studio

Body

Title pretty much sums up my issue. Additional context - using copilot in multiple visual studio 2026 enterprise instances, agent mode, claude opus 4.6, suspect that poor internet connection has something to do with this annoying behavior. One time "refresh credentials" screen popped up even while the agent was busy processing my request.

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[Gecko51]

Yeah, this is a token expiry plus flaky network combo. The OAuth token Copilot uses needs periodic refresh, and when that refresh request fails (dropped connection, timeout), VS prompts you instead of retrying quietly.

Running multiple VS instances makes this worse, each one tries to manage auth independently. Try keeping a single instance open and see if the frequency drops.

If you're on a corporate network or VPN, proxy configs sometimes drop long-lived connections and interfere with the background token refresh. Worth looping in your network team if that's your setup.

A clean re-auth sometimes also helps if there's stale credential state: in VS go to Tools > Options > GitHub > Copilot, sign out completely, then sign back in.

The mid-request interruption you're describing is the most painful part. Agent mode makes long calls, and if the token expires partway through it kills the whole thing. Not much to do about that beyond keeping the connection stable for the duration of a session.

If it happens consistently even on a solid network with a single VS instance, that's worth escalating since it would point to something else going on.

[voidquest]

You are right. Worked through the weekend with a single VS instance with a stable internet connection and haven't encountered this refresh credentials even once. And thinking back to last few weeks when internet connection was more stable - constant re-auth was not an issue even with multiple instances