Is GitHub Down?

This incident has been resolved. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we addressed this issue. A detailed root cause analysis will be shared as soon as it is available.

This incident has been resolved. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we addressed this issue. A detailed root cause analysis will be shared as soon as it is available.

On August 26, 2026, from 21:55 UTC to 23:58 UTC, 2.6% of workflow runs triggered by pull request events were delayed, with the impact rising as high as 25% at its peak. Some users also experienced delays in pull request merge-commit generation, mergeability information, and merge-button availability. Actions and Pull Requests fully recovered by 23:58 UTC; the incident was resolved at 00:26 UTC after normal operation was confirmed. Background jobs that process pull request updates and generate merge commits were impacted by timeouts reaching a single partition of git data. This resulted in a backlog in pull request merge-commit processing, delaying pull request-triggered GitHub Actions workflows and some mergeability information. We reduced workload, shifted traffic away from affected infrastructure, and restored the affected service component to a healthy state. Together, these actions helped drain the backlog and restore normal operations. We are working to improve resource saturation detection and to eliminate customer impact in this scenario by isolating impact, placing better bounds on retries, and strengthening backpressure to make our systems more resilient under load.

On August 26, 2026 from 15:02 to 15:45 UTC, Actions jobs failed to start. The following 2 hours until 17:40 UTC, Actions runs were delayed starting by more than 5 minutes as the system caught up with delayed load. This impact was triggered by saturation of writes to the database primary used by the service processing triggers for Actions workflows. The primary was failed over, but the system did not fully recover. The saturation was caused by growing daily peak load combined with an upstream issue in GitHub’s event processing infrastructure, https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/hcbtzksccj2f, which caused burst amplification of already-high load. Downstream throttles that were later used to recover were set ~10% too high to protect the system. At 15:45 UTC, throttling combined with service restarts recovered the service’s core health. Those throttles were gradually raised between 15:54 and 17:22 to restore full webhook processing for Actions runs. This ramp was deliberately slow to ensure we did not re-overwhelm the system given our original throttling was now known to be incorrectly set. The queue of webhook events was fully burned down at 17:40 UTC. 3.7% of larger-runner jobs, along with some scale-set self-hosted jobs, remained stuck in queued or “waiting for runner” state. We deployed a change to force-revoke jobs in this state, and they transitioned to failed at 18:40 UTC, about 50 minutes after incident mitigation. Releasing these jobs also freed hosted concurrency for larger-runner jobs. Customers using concurrency groups saw longer impact due to a separate issue where runners assigned to a subset of jobs disconnected before the force-revoke mitigation was deployed, which prevented runner acquisition from progressing and left jobs in a waiting-for-runner state. This was resolved at 01:00 UTC on August 27. Some runs triggered during the 15:02-15:45 UTC incident window encountered a bug that left them showing as queued even after service recovery. In the backend, these runs had already failed and will automatically move to canceled state 24 hours after creation. As follow-up, we are fixing the root cause of this queued state and improving our ability to bulk-cancel affected runs. Several changes to improve the general scalability of this part of Actions were already complete and deploying to production. Rollout of those changes will be complete within the next 24 hours. Further work to improve scale, resiliency, and more graceful degradation of Actions workflows are in flight. We are also taking a repair item to accelerate clearing of stuck queued or waiting jobs in similar future cases.

This incident has been resolved. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we addressed this issue. A detailed root cause analysis will be shared as soon as it is available.