GitHub suffered a nearly eight-hour outage on August 17 that disrupted Actions, pull requests, APIs, Git operations, Webhooks, and Copilot. The disruption began at 1:40 PM UTC with degraded performance that spread quickly, peaking at roughly 20% error rates on web and API traffic and 50% on archive and raw content downloads. SAML, OIDC, SCIM, and Team Sync authentication were also hit. Recovery was uneven: after initial fixes at 4:36 PM UTC, Git Operations and API Requests degraded again, and authentication issues, including for Copilot, lingered until GitHub partially disabled authentication-token retries. The incident was fully resolved at 9:15 PM UTC. GitHub has not yet published a root cause analysis.
Questions this post answers
When did the August 2026 GitHub outage happen and how long did it last?
The outage began at 1:40 PM UTC on August 17 and was marked resolved at 9:15 PM UTC, lasting nearly eight hours. It disrupted Actions, pull requests, APIs, Git operations, Webhooks, and Copilot, with peak error rates of about 20% on web and API traffic and roughly 50% on archive and raw content downloads. Track incident timelines like this GitHub outage on daily.dev to gauge impact on your CI/CD pipeline.
Why did GitHub Copilot authentication keep failing during the recent GitHub outage even after other services recovered?
Copilot authentication problems persisted because GitHub was dealing with sporadic authentication failures tied to authentication-token retries, which it partially disabled to improve stability. Copilot degradation started at 2:31 PM UTC, and authentication issues for some applications continued even after Git Operations and API Requests were restored around 7:01 PM UTC, finally clearing by 8:45 PM UTC. Developers weighing AI assistant reliability can follow incidents like this on daily.dev.
What GitHub services were affected during the August 17 outage?
The outage hit API Requests, GitHub Actions, Webhooks, Issues, pull requests, Git operations, archive and raw repository content downloads, SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM, Team Sync, and GitHub Copilot. Recovery was non-linear, with Git Operations and API Requests briefly degrading again after an initial fix was applied. Teams depending on GitHub's connected workflows can monitor outage reports like this via daily.dev.