GitHub outage, August 2026: Incident with GitHub.com
GitHub reported and resolved an incident: Incident with GitHub.com. It lasted 7.6 hours.
OKResolved
From GitHub's official status page, in their words.
What happened
- Started
- Resolved
- Duration
- 7.6 hours
- Impact
- critical
- Affected
- Git Operations, Webhooks, API Requests, Issues, Pull Requests, Actions, Pages, Copilot
- Investigating
- Identifiednot posted
- Monitoringnot posted
- Resolved
Why it happened
GitHub has not given a cause in its updates. We never guess one.
How it was resolved
On August 17, 2026, from 13:28–21:15 UTC (7h 47m), GitHub.com experienced elevated errors and latency across Issues, Pull Requests, APIs, Actions, and Copilot. At peak, web/API error rates were approximately 20%, while archive and raw-content downloads reached approximately 50%. SAML/OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync were also affected, as well as Actions workflows in GHEC with Data Residency that depend on public workflow step definitions hosted on GitHub.com. Most services recovered by 16:36 UTC as our Central US datacenter recovered; Actions was degraded until approximately 18:03 UTC; and Copilot Token Service fully recovered by 21:02. Some of the failing traffic was moved from Central US to Northern Virginia where it was served successfully until the network failure in Central US was debugged and resolved. Delayed replies to a single internal endpoint triggered a latent retry bug in VS Code that amplified traffic by approximately 10x and caused delayed recovery for the Copilot Token Service. The immediate cause of the failure was network saturation on load balancers in Central US due to a new peak in traffic. Originally this was caused by an Istio sidecar pod reaching its concurrency limits and failing to auto scale correctly because of a misconfigured policy that watched host service but not sidecar limits. One failure cascaded to more and eventually four HAProxy nodes exhausted their flow limits, degrading the gateway auth path and causing widespread authenticati
Timeline
Oldest first, from the first notice to the resolution. From GitHub's official status page, in their words.
- investigating
We are investigating reports of impacted performance for some GitHub services.
- investigating
API Requests is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
Actions is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
Webhooks is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
We are seeing an approximate 20% error rate across numerous experiences including Pull Requests, Issues, and others. Investigations are currently under way and we will be posting updates as they become available
- investigating
Issues is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
Pull Requests is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
We are experiencing high error rates around 20% for web experiences and api traffic. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads are experiencing an approximate 50% error rate. Investigations are on-going into the root cause, and updates will continue to be provided as we investigate.
- investigating
We are experiencing high error rates around 20% for web experiences and api traffic. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads are experiencing an approximate 50% error rate. SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync are also impacted. Investigations are on-going and we will continue to provide updates as we discover more information.
- investigating
Copilot is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
Pull Requests is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
Issues is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
Pull Requests is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
Actions is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
We are experiencing high error rates around 20% for web experiences and api traffic. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads are experiencing an approximate 50% error rate. SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync are also impacted. We are currently performing mitigations based on our investigation thus far and are monitoring for improvement.
- investigating
Webhooks is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
API Requests is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
Pages is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
Git Operations is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
Webhooks is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
We are experiencing high error rates around 20% for web experiences and api traffic. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads are experiencing an approximate 50% error rate. SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync are also impacted. We are currently performing mitigations and will post updates as we progress.
- investigating
We are experiencing high error rates around 20% for web experiences and api traffic. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads are experiencing an approximate 50% error rate. SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync are also impacted. We are still working to identify the root cause and will continue to post updates as we learn more and perform mitigation.
- investigating
We identified the problematic component and have taken corrective actions. There are strong signs of recovery but we are still working to completely restore service, with error rates still remaining slightly elevated. We will post further updates as recovery continues.
- investigating
The degradation affecting API Requests, Actions, Git Operations, Issues, Pages, Pull Requests and Webhooks has been mitigated. We are monitoring to ensure stability.
- investigating
Git Operations is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
We identified the problematic component and have taken corrective actions, but we are seeing residual impact across numerous services. We are continuing to apply additional mitigations and investigate the remaining impact.
- investigating
Issues is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
We identified the problematic component and have taken corrective actions, but we are seeing residual impact in the form of sporadic authentication failures. We are continuing to apply additional mitigations and investigate the remaining impact.
- investigating
The degradation affecting Git Operations has been mitigated. We are monitoring to ensure stability.
- investigating
API Requests is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating
API Requests is operating normally.
- investigating
We are continuing to investigate sporadic authentication failures. We have partially disabled authentication token retries and have seen improvement, and we are monitoring impact before fully applying this mitigation.
- investigating
We are continuing to investigate sporadic failures affecting Copilot authentication in some applications. Copilot usage via the GitHub CLI and GitHub App are unaffected.
- investigating
Issues is operating normally.
- investigating
We are continuing to apply mitigations to address sporadic Copilot authentication failures in some applications. We expect full recovery within the next 30 minutes. Copilot usage via the GitHub CLI and GitHub App are unaffected.
- resolved
On August 17, 2026, from 13:28–21:15 UTC (7h 47m), GitHub.com experienced elevated errors and latency across Issues, Pull Requests, APIs, Actions, and Copilot. At peak, web/API error rates were approximately 20%, while archive and raw-content downloads reached approximately 50%. SAML/OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync were also affected, as well as Actions workflows in GHEC with Data Residency that depend on public workflow step definitions hosted on GitHub.com. Most services recovered by 16:36 UTC as our Central US datacenter recovered; Actions was degraded until approximately 18:03 UTC; and Copilot Token Service fully recovered by 21:02. Some of the failing traffic was moved from Central US to Northern Virginia where it was served successfully until the network failure in Central US was debugged and resolved. Delayed replies to a single internal endpoint triggered a latent retry bug in VS Code that amplified traffic by approximately 10x and caused delayed recovery for the Copilot Token Service. The immediate cause of the failure was network saturation on load balancers in Central US due to a new peak in traffic. Originally this was caused by an Istio sidecar pod reaching its concurrency limits and failing to auto scale correctly because of a misconfigured policy that watched host service but not sidecar limits. One failure cascaded to more and eventually four HAProxy nodes exhausted their flow limits, degrading the gateway auth path and causing widespread authenticati
What this means for a business (and what to check now)
- Retry anything that failed during the 7.6 hours.
- Enter any payments, bookings or jobs you took another way.
- If a deadline fell inside the window, keep this page as your record of the outage.
The full guide: what to do when a service you rely on is down
Other GitHub incidents
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- Incident with API, Git, and Copilot requests, resolved after 31 minutes
- Elevated errors on GPT-5.4 Nano, resolved after 38 minutes
- Incident with Dependabot, resolved after 2.5 hours
- Incident with Actions, Pages, and Webhooks, resolved after 1.6 hours
Hear about the next GitHub incident as it starts
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