GitHub incident: Increased Latency and Failures for SSH Git Operations

1. resolvedMay 5, 2026, 18:35 UTC

   Between approximately 14:00 and 16:10 UTC on May 5, 2026, SSH-based Git operations experienced elevated latency and intermittent failures. On average, the error rate was 0.46% and peaked at 0.6% of SSH write requests. HTTP-based Git operations, including web UI and HTTPS clones, were not affected. The impact was caused by reduced SSH capacity at one of our data center sites. During a period of high traffic, the remaining hosts became overloaded, leading to connection exhaustion and some failures for SSH-based operations. Additional capacity was provisioned to expand SSH capacity and resolve the incident. The expanded capacity was fully online by 18:18 UTC. To reduce the likelihood of similar incidents, we will implement faster scaling solutions for SSH infrastructure and improved alerting for host availability and capacity thresholds.

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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