GitHub reported this critical-impact incident on its official status page on Aug 26, 2026, 15:11 UTC. It was resolved after 2h 50m.
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On August 26, 2026 from 15:02 to 15:45 UTC, Actions jobs failed to start. The following 2 hours until 17:40 UTC, Actions runs were delayed starting by more than 5 minutes as the system caught up with delayed load. This impact was triggered by saturation of writes to the database primary used by the service processing triggers for Actions workflows. The primary was failed over, but the system did not fully recover. The saturation was caused by growing daily peak load combined with an upstream issue in GitHub’s event processing infrastructure, https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/hcbtzksccj2f, which caused burst amplification of already-high load. Downstream throttles that were later used to recover were set ~10% too high to protect the system. <br /><br />At 15:45 UTC, throttling combined with service restarts recovered the service’s core health. Those throttles were gradually raised between 15:54 and 17:22 to restore full webhook processing for Actions runs. This ramp was deliberate
All inbound queues have recovered and Actions is operating as expected. 3.7% of jobs assigned to larger runners during the early stage of this incident are stuck waiting for runner assignment. Those will be canceled within the hour. Other runners are successfully processing all new jobs.
The degradation affecting Actions has been mitigated. We are monitoring to ensure stability.
We are continuing to observe recovery and expect actions inbound queues to be back to normal in <30min. Work will continue to flow through the system subject to per-customer concurrency limits.
We are continuing to observe recovery and delayed queues are burning down. Some customers will continue to see increased delays until all throttled work has been completed - we expect this within the next hour.
Pages is operating normally.
We believe we've identified and addressed the issue and are ramping traffic back up slowly to ensure it doesn't recur. Some customers will continue to see delays as we ramp up.
primary failover briefly improved performance but did not fully mitigate, we've throttled inbound traffic and are investigating upstream Vitess issues
We've identified an issue with a database primary and are failing over to a replica immediately
Pages is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
We are investigating reports of degraded availability for Actions
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.
Overlapping incidents aren't necessarily related.
GitHub reported 49 incidents in the last 90 days, 15 of them major or critical. A typical incident lasted 1h 16m. See GitHub's uptime and incident history