A widespread GitHub outage disrupted repository access, downloads, Actions, authentication and other services, potentially slowing open-source development and deployment workflows.
GitHub experienced a widespread outage on August 17, 2026, disrupting infrastructure used to build, host, collaborate on and deploy open-source software. The incident affected several core services, with the website and API reporting around 20% error rates, while archive and raw repository content downloads saw approximately 50% error rates.
GitHub Actions also experienced degraded performance, potentially disrupting automated builds, testing and deployments. Users reported difficulties loading repositories, commits and Pull Requests, while authentication services including SAML, OIDC, SCIM and Team Sync were also affected.
GitHub said it began investigating the incident at 13:40 UTC after error rates increased across web experiences and API traffic. At 14:31 UTC, GitHub reported degraded availability for Copilot. Git Operations, Packages, Pages and Codespaces remained operational at the time.
GitHub’s status update said, “We are experiencing high error rates around 20% for web experiences and api traffic. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads are experiencing an approximate 50% error rate. SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync are also impacted. We are currently performing mitigations and will post updates as we progress.”
The company had not disclosed the cause and said its investigation was ongoing. Downdetector recorded thousands of user reports.
The disruption highlights the dependence of open-source development on GitHub’s proprietary infrastructure. Repository downloads, GitHub Actions and Pull Requests support source-code access, CI/CD and collaboration across distributed open-source projects, making platform outages a potential development and deployment bottleneck.
