GitHub incident: Incident with Pull Requests and Issues

Affected components

• Issues
• Pull Requests

1. resolvedAug 12, 2026, 16:41 UTC

   Between 16:03 and 16:29 UTC on August 12, some users encountered errors when viewing pull requests, issues, and search results. During this period, about 1.9% of Pull Request requests and 0.9% of Issues requests failed. During a database migration, two indexes were removed while application settings still referenced them, causing affected requests to fail. We detected the issue after the migration reached one database shard and before it progressed to the remaining shards. We restored service by disabling both settings. We are improving safeguards around database migrations and application configuration to prevent similar mismatches from causing errors.

2. monitoringAug 12, 2026, 16:38 UTC

   We identified the source of errors affecting Pull Requests, Issues, and Search on GitHub.com and have applied a mitigation. A database index hint was referencing an index that had been removed by a recent migration, causing query failures for some users. We disabled the problematic configuration and are seeing recovery across affected services. We are continuing to monitor to confirm full resolution.

3. monitoringAug 12, 2026, 16:35 UTC

   The degradation affecting Issues and Pull Requests has been mitigated. We are monitoring to ensure stability.

4. investigatingAug 12, 2026, 16:24 UTC

   We are investigating reports of errors affecting Pull Requests and Issues on GitHub.com. Some users may encounter 500 errors when loading pull request and issue pages. Our engineering teams are actively investigating the root cause, which appears to be related to a database infrastructure issue. We will provide an update as soon as we have more information.

5. investigatingAug 12, 2026, 16:16 UTC

   We are investigating reports of degraded performance for Issues and Pull Requests

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.

Other services with incidents at the same time

Overlapping incidents aren't necessarily related.

• Akamai: Certificate Provisioning System (CPS) IssuesMinor · Aug 11, 2026, 10:11 UTC
• Anthropic: Degraded performance for multiple modelsMinor · Aug 12, 2026, 13:50 UTC
• CircleCI: GitHub service degradation may impact customers using GitHubMinor · Aug 12, 2026, 16:33 UTC

How often does GitHub have incidents?

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