GitHub is currently experiencing downtime for certain users due to a significant outage that is leading to errors throughout the website, API, Actions, Pull Requests, and various other services.
The platform acknowledged the outage at 9:40 AM EDT on August 17, 2026, stating that it was looking into reports of performance issues impacting some of its functionalities.
These issues rapidly affected multiple areas of GitHub that developers depend on, such as API Requests, Actions, Webhooks, Issues, and Pull Requests.
As per GitHub’s status page, the company is observing error rates of approximately 20% across its web interface and API traffic.
The situation seems to be even more severe for certain repository downloads, with GitHub reporting that archive downloads and raw repository content downloads are facing error rates nearing 50%.
Additionally, services related to authentication are also encountering difficulties, with SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync being impacted by this incident.
Some users are experiencing server errors when attempting to access GitHub, while others are having trouble loading commits, repositories, and Pull Request pages.
GitHub Actions is also showing reduced performance, which could disrupt automated builds, tests, deployments, and other workflows reliant on GitHub’s CI/CD platform.
At 10:31 AM EDT, GitHub confirmed that Copilot was also facing reduced availability, extending the outage to its AI coding services.
While Git Operations, Packages, Pages, and Codespaces are currently operational, several critical components of GitHub remain degraded.
GitHub has not revealed the cause of the outage and has stated that its investigation is still in progress.
This is an evolving situation…
Update 1: At 11:42 AM EDT, GitHub announced that it is now implementing mitigations. However, error rates continue to hover around 20% for web experiences and API traffic, while archive and raw repository content downloads still report approximately 50% error rates.
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Source: Original article
