GitHub outage on August 26, 2026: Incident with Actions

Official incident from GitHub

Incident with Actions

1. 15:11 Official
   Investigating

   We are investigating reports of degraded availability for Actions

2. 15:12 Official
   Investigating

   Pages is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.

3. 15:23 Official
   Investigating

   We've identified an issue with a database primary and are failing over to a replica immediately

4. 15:48 Official
   Investigating

   primary failover briefly improved performance but did not fully mitigate, we've throttled inbound traffic and are investigating upstream Vitess issues

5. 16:14 Official
   Investigating

   We believe we've identified and addressed the issue and are ramping traffic back up slowly to ensure it doesn't recur. Some customers will continue to see delays as we ramp up.

6. 16:49 Official
   Investigating

   Pages is operating normally.

7. 16:50 Official
   Investigating

   We are continuing to observe recovery and delayed queues are burning down. Some customers will continue to see increased delays until all throttled work has been completed - we expect this within the next hour.

8. 17:32 Official
   Investigating

   We are continuing to observe recovery and expect actions inbound queues to be back to normal in <30min. Work will continue to flow through the system subject to per-customer concurrency limits.

9. 17:54 Official
   Monitoring

   The degradation affecting Actions has been mitigated. We are monitoring to ensure stability.

10. 18:00 Official
    Monitoring

    All inbound queues have recovered and Actions is operating as expected. 3.7% of jobs assigned to larger runners during the early stage of this incident are stuck waiting for runner assignment. Those will be canceled within the hour. Other runners are successfully processing all new jobs.

11. 18:01 Official
    Resolved

    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%...

"Official" rows are quoted from GitHub's public status page, www.githubstatus.com. Very long posts are shortened.