Critical impactResolvedDevOps

GitHub outage: Some SSH connections using deploy keys are failing

GitHub reported this critical-impact incident on its official status page on Jul 21, 2026, 10:31 UTC. It was resolved after 1h 26m.

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Jul 21, 2026, 10:31 UTC
started
Jul 21, 2026, 11:57 UTC
resolved
1h 26m
duration
Critical
impact
  1. resolvedJul 21, 2026, 11:57 UTC

    On July 21, 2026, between 07:41 UTC and 11:57 UTC, the SSH Authentication service was degraded and some SSH connections failed to authenticate. On average, 12.2% of SSH authentication requests failed, peaking at 15.7%. Both user RSA keys and deploy keys were impacted. This was due to a change in how our SSH service handled one public-key authentication method that caused the affected authentication attempts to be rejected as invalid. We mitigated the incident by reverting the change, after which SSH authentication returned to normal. We are working to expand our automated test coverage for our SSH public-key authentication flows to catch more edge cases and to improve observability and alerting on SSH authentication failures, to reduce our time to detection and mitigation of issues like this one in the future.

What APIStatus.watch saw

Our 5-minute checks didn't record a change in GitHub's overall status around this incident. Smaller or regional incidents often leave a provider's overall status green.

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GitHub outage on Jul 21, 2026: Some SSH connections using deploy keys are failing · APIStatus.watch