GitHub experienced a worldwide outage on Monday morning, leaving developers unable to access repositories, merge pull requests, and run automated workflows. The disruption affected several core platform services as error rates rose across GitHub’s web and API traffic.
The outage began at about 9:40 AM EDT on August 17, 2026. GitHub said it was investigating reports of degraded performance, and the incident soon expanded beyond the main website to services that development teams use throughout the day.
GitHub Services Affected by the Outage
Within an hour of the initial reports, GitHub confirmed problems affecting:
- API Requests
- GitHub Actions
- Webhooks
- Issues
- Pull Requests
- GitHub Copilot
Copilot availability was confirmed as degraded by 10:31 AM EDT. The outage also affected authentication and identity-related services, including SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM provisioning, and Team Sync. For enterprise customers using single sign-on, those issues created an additional barrier to accessing GitHub.
GitHub reported high error rates of roughly 20% for web experiences and API traffic. Archive downloads and raw repository-content downloads were affected more heavily, with an approximate 50% error rate.
Worldwide GitHub Access Problems Reported
Downdetector recorded thousands of reports during the incident. The United States saw a peak of 2,100 reports, while India reached 849 reports.
In India, about 79% of reported problems involved website access. Other users reported trouble with the GitHub app and login services. Microsoft, GitHub’s parent company, publicly confirmed that the platform was experiencing issues worldwide.
The scale of the outage meant the impact went beyond individual users trying to open a repository or review code. GitHub is used across software delivery workflows, so interruptions to its services affected automated processes as well as manual work.
GitHub Actions and Webhook Automation Disruptions
Teams using GitHub Actions for continuous integration and deployment faced stalled or failed automated builds, tests, and deployments. When Actions is unavailable or degraded, workflow runs may not complete as expected.
Webhook-based automation was also affected. Deployment triggers and chat notifications that depend on webhooks faced delayed or dropped events during the outage.
For teams relying on multiple connected GitHub services, the disruption touched several parts of the same workflow at once: code access, pull request activity, automation, and event-driven notifications.
GitHub Continued Mitigation Efforts
As of midday Monday, GitHub had not disclosed the cause of the outage. The company said it was performing mitigations based on its investigation and monitoring the platform for improvement.
Some GitHub services remained operational during the incident:
- Git Operations
- GitHub Packages
- GitHub Pages
- GitHub Codespaces
However, several core services continued to operate in a degraded state.
Recent Microsoft and GitHub Service Outages
The GitHub outage was at least the second major disruption involving a Microsoft platform in recent weeks, following an Xbox services outage late last month.
GitHub also experienced a separate outage on August 6 that affected GitHub Actions. During that incident, 71% of workflow runs experienced infrastructure failures.