Why does the Azure Pipelines Build Agent not use the latest version?

We use Azure DevOps for building and deploying our services. We noticed a strange error occurring recently that was very likely related to a bug fixed in a recent release. But we still got the error.

When investigating further we noticed that the ms hosted agent pool does not take the latest release:

Here is the definition as in the yaml file:

The pipeline uses this:

But the concrete version...

... while there should be a newer one, according to the docs:

Are we missing something here?

There is a workaround that we found to work in this thread. But the thread also points to the issue being fixed in the related version 20250617 (that is newer than the one being used by our agents).

Agent updates roll out across multiple "deployment rings" for Azure DevOps. There is a certain order to these rollouts and sometimes, when an issue is detected during the rollout, an image may stop propagating in favor of another image, which starts the whole process over from the start.

The general order is:

• The Azure DevOps Team themselves
• MVPs and other early adopters
• Brazil
• US
• EU
• Asia

Sometimes, it may take several days, even weeks for an image to make it all the way through. It just takes time.

There is no place where you can see which image has been deployed where, other than by creating an organization in each region and monitoring the version numbers.

There is no way to expedite the process, other than moving your organization to an earlier deployment ring.