circuit_breaker_open

What you’ll see

The proxy returns:

{
  "error": "Permission denied",
  "reason": "circuit_breaker_open",
  "correlation_id": "..."
}

In the dashboard, the agent appears with status Suspended and a red badge. The Audit log shows three consecutive failures immediately preceding the suspension.

The agent’s MCP host (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, etc.) will report back through the tool — the response is the JSON above; how your host surfaces it depends on the host.

Why

The circuit breaker is the platform’s safety net for agents that have gone off the rails. It trips after 3 consecutive failures in a row. Failures include:

• Signature verification failed (invalid_signature)
• Scope was denied (scope_not_granted)
• The proxy itself errored (upstream_request_failed)
• The upstream SaaS returned a 5xx that the proxy couldn’t retry past

A single successful call resets the counter to zero, so a healthy agent never trips. The breaker stays open until a human reactivates the agent — there is no time-based decay. This is intentional. We want you to investigate before the agent resumes.

See The auto-suspension safeguard for the design rationale.

Fix

1. Open the agent’s detail page in the dashboard.
2. Click Audit log and look at the three failures immediately before the suspension. The reason and metadata columns explain what each call was trying to do and why it failed.
3. Address the underlying issue:
   • If it’s a missing scope, grant the scope in the permission matrix.
   • If it’s invalid_signature, re-issue the agent’s keypair (see Re-install on another machine).
   • If it’s upstream timeouts, check the platform’s status page.
4. Click Reactivate on the agent’s detail page. The agent immediately becomes callable again with its failure counter reset to zero.

Related: Presidio circuit breaker

There’s a second, internal circuit breaker inside the PII redaction module that protects the proxy from a flapping Presidio service. That one is process-wide (not per-agent) and only affects orgs with the PII beta enabled. It surfaces as a PII redaction 502, not circuit_breaker_open. Don’t confuse the two.