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Copilot Studio Friction

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"This agent is currently unavailable. It has reached its usage limit."

Mitigatedsince 8 July 2026

Last verified

Details & related

Assessment

Confidence
Confirmed officialConfirmed by Microsoft documentation or an official statement.
Severity
Blocking
Typical time lost
Hours

Identification

Licensing & costAll channels

Verification & changes

  1. Verified

    Doc check by human: Official billing and throttling troubleshooting pages re-read during seed migration; 125% enforcement threshold and verbatim end-user message still documented.

  2. Change

    Provisionally approved by the Product Owner; external LLM quality review pending.

  3. Change

    Initial record created from the seed dossier (migration wave 1).

Related

Are you in the right place?

  • Users see the message "This agent is currently unavailable. It has reached its usage limit."
  • Every request to the agent is rejected, in every channel.
  • The agent worked normally until recently, and nothing in its configuration changed.
  • Your tenant pays with prepaid capacity, for example Message Packs.
  • The outage started mid-month, without any deployment on your side.

If credits drain faster than planned but the agent still answers → see Credits are consumed much faster than expected. If instead you see errors like GenAIToolPlannerRateLimitReached → see Agent stops with "…RateLimitReached" errors.

What's happening

This is billing enforcement, not a bug. Copilot Studio meters usage in Copilot Credits. When your tenant reaches 125% of its prepaid capacity, enforcement kicks in (documented as of 2026-07-08). Custom agents are disabled, and every further request is rejected. Users see the exact message above until capacity is increased or the allowance resets. Unused credits from earlier periods do not roll over (documented as of 2026-07-08). It works like a prepaid phone card with a small overdraft: at 125%, the line goes dead mid-call.

For technicians

Enforcement "is triggered when a tenant reaches 125% of their prepaid capacity," per the official billing documentation. The rejection surfaces to end users as the EnforcementMessage string. Internal users with an M365 Copilot license are zero-rated (documented as of 2026-07-08). Unlicensed users and autonomous, scheduled, or flow-triggered runs consume credits. Testing an unpublished agent can still consume credits: prompts and models inside flows bill even from the test pane.

How to fix it

Solution 1

Official fix

Increase the prepaid capacity

  1. Ask your admin to open the Power Platform admin center.
  2. Check the tenant's current Copilot Credits consumption against the purchased capacity.

✅ You should now see: consumption at or above 125% of capacity, matching the enforcement.

  1. Purchase additional Message Packs.
  2. Wait until the new capacity registers.
  3. Retest the agent.

✅ You should now see: the agent answering again.

Solution 2

Official fix

Switch to pay-as-you-go billing

Pay-as-you-go removes the hard cutoff by billing overage to an Azure subscription.

  1. Confirm your organization has an Azure subscription; pay-as-you-go requires one (documented as of 2026-07-08).
  2. Ask your admin to create a billing policy that links the agent's environment to that subscription.
  3. Enable pay-as-you-go for that environment.
  4. Retest the agent.

✅ You should now see: the agent answering, with overage billed instead of blocked.

Check that it worked

Ask the agent any question in the channel where users reported the outage. Expected: a normal answer instead of the unavailability message.

If it didn't work

  • The capacity hasn't registered yet. Purchases and billing policies take time to propagate; retest after a while.
  • The wrong environment is linked. Pay-as-you-go applies per environment; verify the agent's environment is covered by the billing policy.
  • No Azure subscription exists. Pay-as-you-go cannot be enabled without one; treat this as a governance decision, not a toggle.

Prevent it next time

  • Monitor credit consumption and alert well below 100% of capacity, so enforcement never arrives unannounced.
  • Agree capacity caps per agent with your admin before go-live, and review them monthly.
  • Validate cost estimates against real pilot traffic — see Credits are consumed much faster than expected.

Evidence

  • Official documentationlearn.microsoft.com

    Enforcement triggers at 125% of prepaid capacity; custom agents are disabled and all invocations rejected until capacity is increased or reset, and unused credits do not roll over.

  • Official documentationlearn.microsoft.com

    The official troubleshooting page documents the usage-limit and throttling errors agents return when capacity is exhausted.