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I was 45 minutes into a Python refactor last month when Copilot just... quit. Ghost text stopped appearing. The little Copilot icon in my VS Code status bar was still there, taunting me, but nothing was triggering. No error message. Just silence.
Twenty minutes of debugging later, the fix was embarrassingly simple: I'd been rate-limited, and a VS Code restart cleared it. Twenty minutes I could have spent on actual work.
That's the thing about Copilot issues -- they're almost always fixable, and the fixes are usually not complicated. But when it breaks mid-flow, "not complicated" is harder to remember. So here's what actually trips up GitHub Copilot users and what to do about it.
Fix 1: Ghost Text Not Appearing -- Start Here
This is the one I get asked about most often. Copilot is installed, you're signed in, but no suggestions appear when you type. The ghost text just... never shows up.
First, check the status bar. At the bottom of VS Code, you should see the Copilot icon -- it looks like the GitHub Copilot logo (a small pair of angled brackets). If it's greyed out or has a strikethrough, Copilot is either disabled or having an authentication issue. Click it and you'll get a quick menu showing the current status.
If the icon looks normal but suggestions still aren't appearing, try this: open a new file, type a comment describing a simple function, and wait a full two or three seconds. Copilot suggestions sometimes take longer than you'd expect, especially when it's deciding whether to trigger. A lot of people assume it's broken when it's actually just being slow.
Still nothing? Restart VS Code completely. Not reload window -- actually close and reopen. I know it's a cliche solution but I've had Copilot get into weird states after a VS Code update that only a full restart clears. Takes 30 seconds and it works more often than it should.
Fix 2: Check Your Subscription Status
This one's awkward to bring up, but it's the actual cause more often than most people admit.
GitHub Copilot now has a free tier -- Copilot Free -- with 2,000 completions and 50 chat messages per month. It launched in December 2024. But it requires you to explicitly enable it at github.com/settings/copilot. It is not on by default. If you never went through that setup, your account has no Copilot access even though it is technically available to you.
Beyond the free tier: paid plans are Individual ($10/month), Business ($19/user/month), and Enterprise. If your free trial lapsed, your student verification expired, or you thought you were on a team plan but the billing admin cancelled it -- you would have dropped back to no Copilot or the free tier.
Go to github.com/settings/billing and verify your Copilot status. While you are there, check github.com/settings/copilot to confirm the feature is enabled for your account. Both steps matter.
If your subscription is fine but Copilot is still broken, sign out and back in. Open the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows/Linux, Cmd+Shift+P on Mac), run "GitHub Copilot: Sign Out", then sign back in. This refreshes the auth token and fixes a lot of "I'm definitely subscribed but it's not working" problems.
Fix 3: The Extension Is Greyed Out or Disabled
VS Code can disable extensions automatically -- usually because it detected a conflict or had an error during startup. This is more common than you'd think after VS Code updates, when extension compatibility breaks temporarily.
Open your Extensions panel (Ctrl+Shift+X), search for "GitHub Copilot", and look at the status. If you see "Disable" as a button, that means it's currently enabled. If you see "Enable", click it. If you see an orange warning icon, that's a conflict or error -- hover over it to see what's wrong.
Also look for: do you have both GitHub Copilot and GitHub Copilot Chat installed? They're separate extensions and can be in different states. Make sure both are enabled if you want both features working.
One thing that bites people: installing a prerelease version of the extension. The prerelease version sometimes has bugs that the stable version doesn't. If you're on prerelease, switch back to the stable release by clicking the dropdown arrow next to the "Install" button in the extension panel.
Fix 4: Authentication Loops and Token Errors
This one's genuinely annoying. You sign in, get redirected to the browser, authorize it, come back to VS Code... and it asks you to sign in again. Or you're "signed in" but suggestions still don't work.
The root cause is usually a stale or corrupted token. The fix:
- Sign out via Command Palette: "GitHub Copilot: Sign Out"
- Also sign out of GitHub in VS Code's Accounts section (bottom left, the account icon)
- Clear VS Code's credential cache -- on Windows, use Credential Manager to remove any "github.com" entries; on Mac, check Keychain Access; on Linux, check your gnome-keyring or similar
- Restart VS Code
- Sign back in fresh
If you keep hitting the authentication loop even after that, check whether you have GitHub.vscode-pull-request-github or other GitHub-related extensions installed. Multiple extensions competing for the same GitHub auth flow sometimes cause conflicts. Try disabling the other GitHub extensions, completing the Copilot auth, then re-enabling them.
Fix 5: Copilot Disabled for Your Language
Copilot can be toggled on or off per language. It's a useful feature that becomes a frustrating bug when you've accidentally disabled it for a language you care about.
Click the Copilot icon in the status bar while you have a file of the relevant language open. You'll see an option like "Disable Completions for Python" (or whatever language you're in). If it says "Enable Completions for Python" instead, that's your problem -- it was turned off, probably by accident.
You can also check VS Code settings directly. Search for github.copilot.enable in settings and look at the language list. Each entry with false is a language where Copilot is disabled.
Worth noting: Copilot works better in some languages than others even when it's fully enabled. Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, and Go get excellent suggestions. More obscure languages get weaker ones. That's not a bug -- it's a training data problem. If you're working in something like Zig or Elixir and suggestions seem sparse, that's expected.
Fix 6: Copilot Chat vs. Copilot Completions -- Different Features, Different Fixes
A lot of troubleshooting dead ends happen because someone's trying to fix Copilot Chat using the settings for Copilot completions, or vice versa.
Quick distinction: Copilot completions is the ghost text that appears inline as you type. Copilot Chat is the conversational panel where you ask questions and get longer responses (open it with Ctrl+Alt+I or from the View menu).
They're separate features with separate on/off toggles, separate rate limits (on some plans), and separate ways to break.
If ghost text isn't working but Chat is fine: your completions feature specifically has an issue -- check the language settings and extension status.
If Chat isn't working but ghost text is fine: your Chat setup has an issue -- check that the GitHub Copilot Chat extension is installed (it's separate from the base Copilot extension) and that you're not out of chat-specific requests on your plan tier.
If both are broken: that points to an auth issue or a subscription problem -- back to Fix 2.
Fix 7: Firewall, Proxy, and Corporate Network Blocks
This one hits developers on corporate networks and remote work setups with VPNs. Hard.
GitHub Copilot makes HTTPS requests to copilot-proxy.githubusercontent.com and related GitHub API endpoints. If your company firewall, VPN, or proxy intercepts or blocks those requests, Copilot fails -- often with no clear error message in VS Code. It just doesn't work.
Symptoms that suggest a network block: Copilot worked fine at home but fails at the office. Or it worked until your company rolled out a new VPN client. Or the Copilot status shows "Connected" but suggestions never appear.
The diagnostic: check VS Code's Output panel (View > Output, then select "GitHub Copilot" from the dropdown). You'll see the actual error there. Connection timeouts or SSL certificate errors in that log confirm a network block.
Fix options depend on your situation. If it's your own network/VPN: you can whitelist the GitHub Copilot domains in your proxy settings. VS Code's http.proxy setting also lets you route Copilot requests through a specific proxy. If it's a corporate network: you'll need to work with IT. GitHub has official documentation on which domains need to be whitelisted -- search "GitHub Copilot firewall requirements" in their docs.
Fix 8: Rate Limiting and Slow Suggestions
You haven't hit a hard block -- suggestions just stopped being fast or stopped appearing as reliably.
GitHub Copilot rate limits exist. They're not widely publicized, but they're real, and they're more noticeable on the Individual plan during peak hours than on Business plans. If you're doing a lot of rapid-fire typing and accepting suggestions quickly, you can hit a soft rate limit that causes Copilot to start throttling how often it generates suggestions.
The fix is usually just waiting a few minutes. Not ideal, but that's it.
If you're consistently hitting rate limits: look at your workflow. Copilot generates a new suggestion on almost every keystroke. Some developers turn off suggestion-on-every-keystroke behavior and instead trigger suggestions manually with Alt+\ (or whatever your trigger key is). Less API calls, less rate limiting, often more useful suggestions because you're prompting at logical stopping points instead of mid-word.
Slow suggestions that aren't rate limiting are usually network latency. Copilot is a round-trip to GitHub's servers for every suggestion. If your connection to GitHub's API is slow for geographic or network reasons, every suggestion will feel slow. Not much you can do there except check whether a VPN is adding unnecessary hops.
Fix 9: Extension Conflicts
If you imported extensions from VS Code and you've got other AI coding extensions installed, they can conflict with Copilot.
The biggest offender: Tabnine. Tabnine and GitHub Copilot both hook into VS Code's inline completion API. When both are active, you get race conditions -- suggestions from both fire at the same time, they cancel each other out, or VS Code's suggestion rendering gets confused. Same issue applies to Codeium, IntelliCode with AI features enabled, and other inline AI completers.
The fix is simple: pick one AI coding assistant and disable the others. If you're committed to Copilot, disable everything else that does inline completions.
Other extension conflicts are less common but real. Extensions that aggressively manipulate the editor's suggestion system -- some Vim emulators, some custom autocomplete extensions -- can intercept the keystrokes or UI events that Copilot uses. If you've been adding extensions recently and Copilot stopped working around the same time, that's your debugging path: disable recent additions one at a time.
If you're currently evaluating whether Copilot is worth keeping or whether to switch, our Cursor vs Copilot vs Codeium comparison breaks down how each handles these real-world reliability issues, not just the marketing copy.
Fix 10: Copilot in GitHub.com Not Working (PR Reviews, Issues)
Copilot isn't just an IDE thing. GitHub has been rolling out Copilot features directly on GitHub.com -- in PR reviews, in issue descriptions, in code search. These are separate from your VS Code setup and can fail independently.
If Copilot suggestions aren't appearing on GitHub.com: first check that your subscription includes GitHub.com features. Some plan tiers only cover IDE usage. Check your plan details at github.com/settings/copilot.
If the plan's right but it's still not working: try a hard refresh of the GitHub.com page (Ctrl+Shift+R / Cmd+Shift+R). Browser extensions -- especially ad blockers and privacy extensions -- can block GitHub's feature detection scripts that determine whether to show Copilot UI elements. Disable extensions temporarily to see if that's the issue.
The GitHub.com Copilot features also roll out gradually -- not everyone gets them at the same time. If you don't see certain Copilot features on GitHub.com that you've read about, it's possible you're just in a later rollout cohort. Check the GitHub changelog for when features went generally available.
When Nothing Works
You've gone through everything above and Copilot is still broken. A few things left to try:
Reinstall the extension. Uninstall GitHub Copilot from VS Code, restart, and reinstall fresh. Sometimes the extension files get corrupted.
Check GitHub's status page. GitHub has outages. Not often, but it happens. Check githubstatus.com for active incidents on the API or Copilot service.
File a support ticket. GitHub Copilot has actual support for paid subscribers. Go to support.github.com and submit a ticket with your account info and the VS Code Output log from the Copilot section. They're reasonably responsive.
If Copilot keeps giving you grief and you're spending more time troubleshooting than coding, it might be worth a look at the alternatives. We have a similar guide for Cursor AI not working if you've been considering making the switch. And for context on Microsoft Copilot (which is a completely different product despite the similar name), that's covered in our Microsoft Copilot troubleshooting guide.
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