GitHub experienced a widespread service disruption on August 17 that affected several of its major services, including Copilot, API requests, Git operations, Actions, Issues, Pages, Pull Requests and Webhooks.
The company began investigating the incident after reports of degraded performance appeared across multiple GitHub services.
At the height of the incident, GitHub reported error rates of around 20 percent for web experiences and API traffic. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads were experiencing an error rate of approximately 50 percent. Enterprise authentication services including SAML and OIDC, along with SCIM and Team Sync, were also affected.
The disruption began impacting individual services shortly after the initial investigation started. API Requests, Actions, Webhooks, Pull Requests, Issues, Pages and Git Operations were all reported as experiencing degraded availability or performance. GitHub Copilot was also affected, with some users experiencing problems accessing the service.
GitHub later said it had identified the problematic component and taken corrective action. The company reported strong signs of recovery, although error rates remained slightly elevated while engineers continued working to fully restore services.
Several affected services were subsequently brought back to normal operation. GitHub said the degradation affecting API Requests, Actions, Git Operations, Issues, Pages, Pull Requests, and Webhooks had been mitigated, although it continued to monitor the platform for stability.
The company later reported that Issues was operating normally but continued investigating sporadic authentication failures affecting Copilot in some applications. GitHub said Copilot usage through the GitHub CLI and GitHub App was not affected.
Engineers partially disabled authentication token retries as part of the mitigation process and observed improvements. GitHub continued applying additional fixes as some residual authentication failures remained.
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The incident was eventually resolved, with GitHub thanking users for their patience and saying a detailed root cause analysis would be shared once available.
