● Covered by 5 sources · 14 reportsMedium impact7 negative6 neutral
GitHub Actions and Pages Experience Degraded Availability, Migration to Azure Accelerated
Key points
- GitHub Actions and Pages experienced degraded availability on August 6.
- Workflow runs were delayed or failed, impacting self-hosted runners and Copilot.
- GitHub acknowledged falling short of availability commitments.
- Architectural roadmap for Actions is being accelerated.
- Full migration of GitHub Actions to Azure is planned.
- GitHub experienced 20% error rates for web and API traffic.
- Archive and raw repository content downloads had 50% error rates.
- SAML, OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync were impacted.
- The outage was confirmed at 9:40 AM EDT on August 17, 2026.
- Webhooks, Git operations, Pull Requests, and Issues were impacted.
- Cursor Origin, a new Git platform, was affected by the GitHub degradation.
- Cursor Automations, Cloud Agents, and Review Agents were impacted.
- The August 17 outage lasted 7 hours and 47 minutes.
- The outage was caused by a critical infrastructure component failing to scale.
- The incident occurred in the Central US data center.
- Copilot services took longer to recover than most other GitHub services.
- GitHub now sees 2.9 billion commits per month.
- GitHub processes 130 million merged pull requests monthly.
- GitHub has 24 million new repositories monthly.
- Monthly commits grew from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion since April.
- The August 17 outage lasted almost eight hours.
- The outage was not caused by code changes.
- The traffic surge is attributed to increased AI-generated code.
- GitHub added over 3 million CPU cores and 120 petabytes of storage.
- Azure now serves 58% of GitHub's platform load.
- GitHub ran a production MySQL primary from Azure for the first time on August 11.
- GitHub ran two more MySQL primaries from Azure on August 27.
- GitHub made improvements to capacity monitoring and management.
- GitHub made improvements to retry policies.
- GitHub made resiliency improvements to core services.
Outage Affects GitHub Services
On August 6, GitHub experienced an incident that led to degraded availability for multiple services, including GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages. This resulted in workflow runs failing or being delayed, and some queued jobs potentially timing out.
The incident also impacted other GitHub functionalities, such as self-hosted runners, which may have seen errors or rate limiting during registration. Services like Copilot code review, Copilot coding agent, hosted runners, and migrations using GitHub Enterprise Importer were also affected. Webhook deliveries experienced delays.
GitHub Acknowledges Impact and Shortcomings
GitHub stated that the incident on August 6 was unacceptable in its impact and duration, acknowledging that it fell short of its availability commitments to users. The company recognized the significant impact such a prolonged outage has on user productivity and trust.
A deeper root cause analysis (RCA) is underway to fully understand all contributing factors. GitHub plans to provide a complete update in its August availability post, to be published in September.
Accelerated Migration to Azure
In response to the incident, GitHub is accelerating its architectural roadmap for GitHub Actions. This roadmap focuses on improving isolation, resiliency, and scalability for the service.
A key part of this acceleration involves migrating the GitHub Actions service fully to Azure. GitHub noted that the core Actions service was still running in its data centers during the incident, which was a contributing factor to capacity issues.
Updates
- GitHub ran a production MySQL primary from Azure for the first time on August 11.
- GitHub ran two more MySQL primaries from Azure on August 27.
- GitHub made improvements to capacity monitoring and management.
- GitHub made improvements to retry policies.
- GitHub made resiliency improvements to core services.
- GitHub added over 3 million CPU cores and 120 petabytes of storage.
- Azure now serves 58% of GitHub's platform load.
- GitHub now sees 2.9 billion commits per month.
- GitHub processes 130 million merged pull requests monthly.
- GitHub has 24 million new repositories monthly.
- Monthly commits grew from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion since April.
- The August 17 outage lasted almost eight hours.
- The outage was not caused by code changes.
- The traffic surge is attributed to increased AI-generated code.
- The August 17 outage lasted 7 hours and 47 minutes.
- The outage was caused by a critical infrastructure component failing to scale.
- The incident occurred in the Central US data center.
- Copilot services took longer to recover than most other GitHub services.
- Cursor Origin, a new Git platform, was affected by the GitHub degradation.
- Cursor Automations, Cloud Agents, and Review Agents were impacted.
- GitHub experienced 20% error rates for web and API traffic.
- Archive and raw repository content downloads had 50% error rates.
- SAML, OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync were impacted.
- The outage was confirmed at 9:40 AM EDT on August 17, 2026.
- Webhooks, Git operations, Pull Requests, and Issues were impacted.
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Primary sources
GitHub articles/github-privacy-statement GitHub github/roadmap GitHub devops/tools GitHub get-started/exploring-integrations GitHub site-policy/github-terms GitHub github/site-policyHow outlets covered it
Zed has launched Delta, a new collaborative coding environment in public beta, designed for developers and coding agents to work together using shared threads instead of traditional pull requests. This release responds to increasing developer sentiment that GitHub's current model is becoming less suitable for the high volume of code generated by AI agents and its recent reliability issues.
GitHub experienced availability challenges in August 2026 but made progress on its migration to Azure, including running production MySQL primaries from Azure for the first time. The platform also implemented improvements to capacity management, retry policies, and core service resiliency, while continuing work on GitHub Actions and pull request isolation. These efforts address recent incidents and aim to improve platform stability and scalability.
GitHub's monthly commit volume more than doubled from 1.4 billion in April to 2.9 billion in August, leading to a 7-hour outage on August 17 due to infrastructure scaling issues. This surge, attributed to AI-generated code, exposes a growing disparity between machine-paced code generation and human-paced verification capacity. The platform responded by adding over 3 million CPU cores and 120 petabytes of storage, and accelerating its migration to Azure.
A developer created a website to filter GitHub's incident history by specific services and severity levels. This tool allows users to customize their view of GitHub's reliability based on their individual dependencies and expected uptime.
GitHub services experienced a period of disruption, which has since been resolved. A detailed root cause analysis is pending and will be shared by GitHub.
GitHub experienced an extended outage due to a doubling of monthly commits from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion in the last four months, leading to capacity failures. This surge in traffic, attributed to increased AI-generated code, highlights scaling challenges for the platform.
GitHub reported 2.9 billion monthly commits, a significant increase that has strained its infrastructure and led to outages, including an eight-hour incident on August 17. The company is migrating more of its platform to Azure and has added substantial hardware, but its CTO acknowledges that scaling efforts have not kept pace with demand.
GitHub experienced a 7-hour, 47-minute outage on August 17, affecting multiple services including github.com, authentication, and GitHub Actions, due to a critical infrastructure component failing to scale with a new traffic peak. This incident, along with another in August, highlights ongoing capacity challenges despite previous reliability efforts and accelerated migration to Azure.
Cursor experienced a service degradation affecting its Automations, Cloud Agents, Review Agents, and Origin Git platform due to an upstream GitHub degradation. The issue has since been resolved, and services have recovered.
GitHub has been experiencing a significant outage since approximately 9:40 AM ET, impacting core functionalities like API requests, pull requests, webhooks, and Copilot. This disruption affects developers globally and marks at least the second major outage for a Microsoft platform in recent weeks.
GitHub is experiencing a widespread outage affecting its website, API, Actions, Pull Requests, and other services, with error rates up to 50% for some functions. This outage impacts developers globally, disrupting automated workflows, code access, and authentication, including its AI coding service, Copilot.
GitHub is experiencing significant service degradation, including 20% error rates for web and API traffic, and 50% for archive downloads. Core functionalities like Git operations, Pull Requests, Issues, Actions, and Copilot are impacted, disrupting development workflows globally.
GitHub reported an outage affecting GitHub Actions on August 6, acknowledging it fell short of availability commitments. In response, GitHub is accelerating its architectural roadmap for Actions, specifically migrating the service fully to Azure to enhance isolation, resiliency, and scalability.
GitHub is experiencing degraded availability for GitHub Actions and Pages, leading to failing or delayed workflow runs and potential timeouts for queued jobs. This incident also impacts self-hosted runners, Copilot services, and GitHub Enterprise Importer migrations, affecting developers relying on these core GitHub functionalities.