As of January 13, 2026, this error appears to be occurring globally. Given the situation, it may be safer to temporarily switch to Codex or Claude Code around 19:00 (Japan Standard Time, JST / UTC+9).
Today (Dec 10, 2025), I ran into an unexpected interruption while using GitHub Copilot Chat inside VS Code. Right when I asked Copilot to analyze part of my code, the following message appeared:
Sorry, the upstream model provider is currently experiencing high demand.
Please try again later or consider switching models.
In my case, this only happened when I had “Gemini 3 Pro (Preview)” selected as the active Copilot model. As soon as I switched back to the default GitHub Copilot model, the same request worked immediately with no issues. That contrast alone suggested it wasn’t a local problem.
After checking recent GitHub Discussions, Issues, and community posts, the pattern was very clear:
this error doesn’t come from VS Code misconfiguration or a networking failure. It appears only when the upstream AI model provider becomes overloaded, especially with preview-stage models that don’t always guarantee stable capacity. Multiple developers have reported identical behavior, often tied to rate limiting or temporary server congestion.
So the practical conclusion is simple:
there’s nothing the user can “fix.” When this message appears, the only workable options are:
- Switch to a different model (default Copilot, GPT-4o, o3-mini-high, etc.)
- Retry after a few minutes until the provider recovers
That’s exactly what happened today as well. After switching models, everything worked normally; and after several minutes, even the preview model returned to normal behavior. This is essentially a backend load issue, not an environment issue. Knowing that keeps you from wasting time reinstalling extensions or debugging settings unnecessarily.
References (used for SERP verification)
- GitHub Community Discussions: error reports
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/170487 - VS Code Copilot Extension Issue #13339
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-release/issues/13339 - Rate-limiting discussion (Issue #8131)
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-release/issues/8131 - Reddit user reports
https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1lppuus/sorry_the_upstream_model_provider_is_currently/ - GitHub Status announcement
https://x.com/githubstatus/status/1980284773412041090
