GitHub is experiencing a widespread service disruption that is affecting multiple core platform components, with the company reporting elevated error rates across its web experience and API traffic.
The incident began at approximately 13:40 UTC on August 17, when GitHub reported that it was investigating performance problems affecting some of its services. Within minutes, the disruption expanded across Pull Requests, Issues, Actions, Webhooks and other parts of the platform.
GitHub later disclosed that it was seeing error rates of around 20% across web experiences and API traffic, while archive downloads and raw repository content downloads were failing at an estimated rate of approximately 50%.
As of the latest updates, GitHub continues to investigate the underlying cause and is performing mitigations. For live incident timeline, please scroll down.
GitHub outage affects multiple services
The incident initially appeared to involve degraded performance affecting individual GitHub services. The scope quickly expanded.
GitHub’s incident updates show degradation across several critical components, including (Update – Everything is back online)
GitHub Services those are currently NOT affected or back online (Update – Everything is back online)
- Codespaces
- AI Model Providers
- API Requests
- Web experiences
- Raw repository content downloads
- Issues
- GitHub Pages
- Webhooks
- GitHub Actions
- Pull Requests
- Git Operations
- GitHub Copilot
- SAML and OIDC authentication
- SCIM
- Team Sync
- Archive downloads
The disruption is particularly significant for organizations that depend on GitHub as part of their development and CI/CD infrastructure.
API traffic sees approximately 20% error rate
One of the most significant developments came at 14:04 UTC, when GitHub reported high error rates affecting its web experiences and API traffic.
By 14:24 UTC, GitHub estimated that approximately 20% of requests were returning errors.
📬 Stay Ahead of Cyber Threats
Get the latest cybersecurity news, critical vulnerabilities, threat intelligence, tutorials, and exclusive giveaways delivered straight to your inbox. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Subscribe to the Newsletter →The company subsequently reported that the same approximate 20% error rate was affecting numerous experiences, including Pull Requests and Issues.
For developers and automated systems, API instability can have a much wider impact than a normal website outage.
Applications that interact with GitHub programmatically may experience failed requests, authentication problems, delayed operations or unexpected API responses.
Raw repository downloads seeing roughly 50% errors
GitHub also reported a significantly higher failure rate for repository-related downloads.
According to the company’s incident updates, archive downloads and raw repository content downloads were experiencing an approximate 50% error rate.
This can affect developers and automated systems attempting to retrieve repository archives or raw files from GitHub.
The impact may be particularly noticeable for build pipelines, deployment systems, scripts and other services that pull source files directly from GitHub.
GitHub Actions also degraded
GitHub Actions, the platform’s integrated CI/CD service, was also affected.
GitHub reported degraded availability for Actions during the incident.
For engineering teams, an Actions disruption can prevent or delay automated workflows such as:
- Software builds
- Automated testing
- Container builds
- Package publishing
- Deployment pipelines
- Scheduled automation
- Security scanning
- Infrastructure workflows
The impact depends on the individual workflow and whether it relies on other GitHub services that are also experiencing errors.
Pull Requests and Issues affected
Pull Requests and Issues were among the first major GitHub features reported as experiencing degraded performance.
GitHub reported Pull Requests as degraded at approximately 13:42 UTC, followed by Issues at 13:58 UTC.
The company later reported that numerous GitHub experiences were seeing approximately 20% error rates.
Users may therefore encounter failed page loads, delayed operations or errors while creating, viewing or interacting with Issues and Pull Requests.
Webhooks experiencing degraded availability
GitHub Webhooks are also affected.
This is particularly important for organizations that use GitHub to trigger external systems.
Webhooks are commonly used to connect repository events with CI/CD platforms, deployment systems, security tooling, ticketing systems and internal automation.
GitHub reported Webhooks as experiencing degraded performance early in the incident and later upgraded the description to degraded availability.
Organizations relying heavily on webhook-driven automation should therefore verify that important downstream workflows are processing events correctly.
Enterprise authentication services impacted
The incident is not limited to developer-facing features.
GitHub reported that SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM and Team Sync were also impacted.
These services are particularly relevant to enterprise customers using GitHub’s centralized identity and organization-management capabilities.
Authentication and provisioning problems could potentially affect users attempting to access GitHub organizations or systems integrated with GitHub’s enterprise identity infrastructure.
GitHub Copilot also affected
GitHub Copilot was reported as experiencing degraded availability at approximately 14:31 UTC.
The Copilot disruption comes as the broader GitHub platform was already experiencing elevated errors across web and API traffic.
Users may therefore experience intermittent failures or degraded availability when attempting to use Copilot-related functionality.
Timeline of the GitHub incident
The incident began shortly before 13:40 UTC on August 17.
13:40 UTC
GitHub began investigating reports of impacted performance affecting some GitHub services.
13:41 UTC
API Requests were reported as experiencing degraded performance.
13:42 UTC
GitHub Actions reported degraded performance.
13:44 UTC
Webhooks were reported as experiencing degraded performance.
13:45 UTC
GitHub reported approximately 20% error rates across numerous experiences, including Pull Requests and Issues.
13:46 UTC
GitHub continued investigating the elevated error rates.
13:58 UTC
Issues were reported as experiencing degraded performance.
14:04 UTC
GitHub reported approximately 20% error rates across web experiences and API traffic.
14:24 UTC
GitHub confirmed that web and API traffic were still experiencing approximately 20% errors. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads were also affected.
14:31 UTC
GitHub Copilot was reported as experiencing degraded availability.
14:49 UTC
Issues were again reported as experiencing degraded availability.
14:54 UTC
Pull Requests were reported as experiencing degraded availability.
14:58 UTC
GitHub reported that approximately 20% of web and API traffic was still returning errors.
The company also disclosed an approximately 50% error rate for archive and raw repository downloads.
SAML, OIDC authentication, SCIM and Team Sync were also reported as impacted.
GitHub said it was performing mitigations based on its investigation and monitoring for improvement.
15:01 UTC
API Requests were reported as experiencing degraded availability.
15:01 UTC
GitHub continued investigating the incident.
15:10 UTC
Pages is experiencing degraded performance.
15:21 UTC
Git Operations experiencing degraded performance. Investigation continues.
15:40 UTC
Webhooks experiencing degraded performance. Investigation continues.
15:42 UTC
Multiple mitigations being carried out.
16:15 UTC
GitHub is still identifying the root cause.
16:18 UTC
Multiple services of GitHub coming back online slowly.
16:35 UTC
GitHub has identified the issues and mitigations have been applied.
19:13 UTC
Intermittent auth failures observed. Mitigations applied.
What is causing the GitHub outage?
GitHub has not publicly disclosed the root cause in the incident updates provided so far.
The company has said that it is investigating the issue and performing mitigations based on its findings.
There is currently no confirmation from GitHub that the incident is related to a cyberattack, security breach or malicious activity.
The available information therefore does not support attributing the outage to a cyberattack at this stage.
The unusually broad impact across APIs, repository downloads, authentication, webhooks, Actions and other services suggests that the incident involves infrastructure supporting multiple GitHub services, but the precise technical cause remains unconfirmed.
Why this outage matters
GitHub has become much more than a place to host Git repositories.
Modern development environments frequently depend on GitHub for source control, CI/CD, authentication, automation, package distribution and developer tooling.
A disruption affecting multiple GitHub components can therefore create a cascading impact beyond GitHub’s own website.
A failed API request could prevent an automation from retrieving repository information.
A failed webhook could prevent a downstream deployment from starting.
An Actions failure could stop a build or release pipeline.
Repository download failures could prevent external systems from retrieving source code.
Authentication problems could prevent enterprise users from accessing resources.
The result is that even intermittent failures can have an outsized effect on engineering operations.
Developers and organizations should check automated workflows
Organizations experiencing problems should verify whether critical automation is successfully completing rather than assuming that a transient GitHub error will automatically recover.
Teams should pay particular attention to:
- GitHub Actions workflows
- Webhook delivery
- Deployment pipelines
- Repository downloads
- API-dependent applications
- Enterprise authentication
- SCIM provisioning
- Team synchronization
- Automated security tooling
- Scheduled GitHub jobs
For critical production pipelines, teams should also verify whether failed operations are automatically retried or require manual intervention.
GitHub continues mitigation efforts
GitHub says it is continuing to investigate the incident while performing mitigations based on its findings.
The latest updates indicate that the incident remains ongoing, with API Requests and Webhooks among the services reporting degraded availability.
The company has not yet provided a definitive root cause or a final resolution time.
As GitHub continues publishing updates, the scope and severity of the incident may change.
Bottom line
GitHub is currently experiencing a broad service disruption affecting APIs, web experiences, repository downloads, Actions, Pull Requests, Issues, Webhooks, Copilot and enterprise identity services.
The most significant figures disclosed so far are an estimated 20% error rate across web and API traffic and approximately 50% errors affecting archive and raw repository content downloads.
GitHub is actively investigating and applying mitigations. There is currently no confirmed indication that the incident is the result of a cyberattack.
Developers and organizations relying on GitHub for source control, CI/CD or automation should monitor their workflows closely until the company declares the incident resolved.
This article will be updated as GitHub publishes additional information about the incident, its root cause and the recovery process. Additionally, live status being updated manually after checking. Hence, faster updates compared to official status page.
