Widespread Outage Brings GitHub to its Knees, Leaving Developers Scrambling
A devastating global outage has crippled GitHub, a crucial platform for developers and open-source projects, sending shockwaves through the tech industry. As of this morning, thousands of users are experiencing errors accessing various parts of the website, including API requests, Actions, Webhooks, Issues, and Pull Requests.
The issues began around 9:40 AM EDT, when Microsoft-owned GitHub confirmed it was investigating reports of performance problems affecting some of its services. Within hours, the outage had spread to multiple areas of the platform, causing frustration for developers who rely on GitHub’s services for their work.
According to GitHub’s status page, error rates are currently around 20% across the web experience and API traffic. However, things are even more dire for repository downloads, with archive downloads and raw repository content downloads experiencing error rates of approximately 50%. The outage is also affecting authentication-related services, including SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync.
The impact of this outage extends far beyond just GitHub’s users. Many organizations rely on the platform for their development workflows, which are now disrupted by the service degradation. Automated builds, tests, deployments, and other workflows that depend on GitHub’s CI/CD platform are also affected, making it a critical issue for businesses that use GitHub as a core part of their operations.
As of this writing, GitHub is still investigating the cause of the outage, but has not provided any details on what may have triggered it. The company is working to implement mitigations, although error rates remain high across various services. This incident serves as a stark reminder of the importance of having robust backup plans and contingency strategies in place for critical infrastructure.
In light of this outage, developers and organizations using GitHub would do well to review their backup procedures and consider implementing additional safeguards to minimize the impact of future outages. By taking proactive steps to prepare for potential disruptions, businesses can help ensure continuity and reduce downtime when services like GitHub are affected by an outage.
Source: Bleeping Computer — 2026-08-17