--- title: Incident with Actions, Pull Requests and Issues | daily.dev description: GitHub experienced a multi-hour incident affecting Actions, Issues, Pull Requests, and notifications, starting around 12:21 UTC on October 12, 2026. Users saw... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/incident-with-actions-pull-requests-and-issues-eh6vm1w9m twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Incident with Actions, Pull Requests and Issues | daily.dev og:description: GitHub experienced a multi-hour incident affecting Actions, Issues, Pull Requests, and notifications, starting around 12:21 UTC on October 12, 2026. Users saw... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/incident-with-actions-pull-requests-and-issues-eh6vm1w9m og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/Eh6VM1W9M.png og:image:alt: Incident with Actions, Pull Requests and Issues og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Incident with Actions, Pull Requests and Issues **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary GitHub experienced a multi-hour incident affecting Actions, Issues, Pull Requests, and notifications, starting around 12:21 UTC on October 12, 2026. Users saw degraded performance loading the Actions tab, interacting with the Checks API, queueing Actions runs, creating/updating issues, and requesting PR reviews via REST and GraphQL. An initial mitigation was only partially effective, requiring additional fixes. Pull Requests recovered first, followed by Actions and Issues being mitigated, and finally notifications resumed though with an ongoing backlog causing continued delays. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 134 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-12). **TL;DR:** Developers largely attribute GitHub's recurring outages to explosive growth in AI/agentic usage overwhelming free-tier infrastructure, with heated disagreement over whether the fix should be pricing changes, infra redesign, or simply moving away from GitHub Actions/CI entirely. **Sentiment:** 5% positive · 35% mixed · 60% skeptical **The case for** - Some argue the scale of growth (claimed tens of times normal volume) would strain any system, so some sympathy is warranted for the engineering team. - A few note the free tier helps GitHub acquire new customers and build network effects/data advantages that may justify the strain. - Several point out GitHub Actions still offers unmatched convenience like free cross-platform (Windows/macOS/Linux, x64/ARM) runners. **The pushback** - Many argue GitHub's pricing hasn't kept pace with usage, especially for Actions, enabling abuse by free-tier 'vibe coding' and agentic workloads. - Some say enterprise/paid tiers are also affected, undermining the idea that paying more avoids the outages. - Critics contend this is a policy failure—GitHub/Microsoft knowingly let uncontrolled growth degrade reliability instead of rate-limiting or redesigning infra. - Several commenters report moving or planning to move off GitHub (to GitLab, self-hosted runners, RWX, etc.) due to repeated incidents. - Some dispute the 'scale is impossible' framing, arguing other large-scale systems (cloud providers, VisaNet) handle comparable or higher throughput without this instability. **By community** - hackernews (heated): Discussion splits sharply between blaming explosive AI/agentic usage for overwhelming infrastructure and blaming GitHub's own pricing/policy choices and technical decisions, with extended sub-arguments over analogies, scale numbers, and whether to self-host CI instead. **Hottest debate:** Whether the outages are primarily an unavoidable consequence of massive AI-driven traffic growth, or a self-inflicted problem caused by GitHub's free-tier pricing and policy choices that could be fixed by charging more or rate-limiting usage. **Open questions** - Is the surge in traffic actually driven by AI/agentic coding tools, or by other factors like infrastructure migration or operational changes? - What exact metric is behind the frequently cited growth numbers (e.g., '2B per day'), since commenters couldn't agree on what it refers to? - Would introducing paid tiers or stricter free-tier limits for Actions meaningfully reduce the incident frequency? **Highlights** > > going from 50M of per day to 2B per day will break pretty much any system anyone has ever built here This is likely a pricing failure. Systems breaking due to over-usage is like going to the store and finding that they're sold out. You're much less likely to sell out if you charge more. Meanwhile, GitHub not only didn't raise prices, they cut them at the beginning of the year: https://github.com/resources/insights/2026-pricing-changes-f... And this is beside them cutting the Pro tier from $7/seat/month to $4/seat/month back in 2020 and not touching the price since: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/learning-about-github... Bear in mind as well that the Pro tier includes 3,000 minutes/month and the Enterprise tier ($21/seat/month, and no published minimum seat floors) includes 50,000 minutes/month. $21/50,000 minutes/month for a solopreneur is practically giving away the farm. GitHub needs to drastically increase pricing, at least for Actions; their current pricing is practically a WTO dumping violation. > — [solatic on hackernews · 5 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50058006) > > This is likely a pricing failure. Problem is while we have a visceral feel for what the "value" of GitHub is to human users for human usage, I'm not sure we have a feel for what the value of the agentic equivalent is. IMO it's probably very high on paper if you think through what kind of work is unlocked at agent speeds, provided you have a very capable work-execution fabric. But since we're anchored to human pricing, whatever they propose will feel expensive. > — [mgdev on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50059646) > So I see an interesting side effect of all of this in your comment. The groupthink seems to conclude that the root of GH's issues are: - A dramatic increase in its traffic due to vibecoding - Azure just generally not being very reliable Now, if you're not a paying customer, maybe you just ignore this and chalk it up to "I'm getting what I paid for". And if you're a paying customer, you migrate away. What happens to GH then? Well, you (and other paying customers) are probably only a small part of the first of the identified causes, and not at all a contributor to the second. So it's not like you moving away will make GH more reliable, but it does lessen MS's motivations for fixing things: GH as a business unit works by having a free tier and a premium tier and that's fine as long as the profit from the premium tier exceeds the cost of the free tier. THat's long winded way of saying: I wonder if you/other paying customers leaving is the real start of a GH death spiral. Less paying customers == less MS investment == less paying customers == less MS investment, etc. > — [Octoth0rpe on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50057121) > I was very excited about this comment until I got to this part: > That's a seriously insane number to keep up with at GitHub's scale. What exactly is it about GitHub's workload that makes us feel like the specific 23k things happening in that slice of one second are tantamount to insanity? In my experience, much of GitHub activity is changing labels on issues and posting plaintext comments. Technically speaking, this rate of things happening per second is well within the territory of what one large server can handle. I know it sounds wild to imply that we could run all of the GitHub public cloud off a single machine, but how crazy is it in reality when we start to consider the actual I/O bandwidth that is available in a leading edge server platform? All of VisaNet circa 2009 could run off a single mainframe. That's global. It is plausible they still operate this way. Virtually 100% of the aspects of GitHub that would quickly saturate I/O on the transactional core can be offloaded to horizontal systems like blob storage and CDNs. > — [bob1029 on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50058370) > I have difficulty finding what exactly is talked about as 2b per day, but it is not all operations. GitHub saw 473.3 billion events per month lately (https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/bu...), or ~183K events per second on average. So the 2b number is something much more expensive. > — [afdbcreid on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50059892) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50055375) · 148 points · 134 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [GitHub appears to be struggling with one nine availability](https://daily.dev/posts/github-appears-to-be-struggling-with-one-nine-availability-d4tedw2tw) · The Register · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [GitHub availability report: March 2026](https://daily.dev/posts/github-availability-report-march-2026-c2dt15scg) · GitHub Blog · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [GitHub has another tough day](https://daily.dev/posts/github-has-another-tough-day-dvefjjxpq) · Surfing Complexity · 18 upvotes · 4 comments - [GitHub Status](https://daily.dev/posts/github-status-rbmhgeg1f) · Hacker News · 6 upvotes · 1 comments --- Tags: [#github](https://daily.dev/tags/github), [#github-actions](https://daily.dev/tags/github-actions) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/incident-with-actions-pull-requests-and-issues-eh6vm1w9m) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Incident with Actions, Pull Requests and Issues","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/incident-with-actions-pull-requests-and-issues-eh6vm1w9m","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/incident-with-actions-pull-requests-and-issues-eh6vm1w9m"},"datePublished":"2026-10-12T16:15:30.383Z","dateModified":"2026-10-12T21:01:30.308Z","description":"GitHub experienced a multi-hour incident affecting Actions, Issues, Pull Requests, and notifications, starting around 12:21 UTC on October 12, 2026. 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