GitHub outage: Website, API, Actions and Copilot affected as users report widespread issues

GitHub reportedly experienced a widespread outage on August 17, 2026, affecting several of its key services, including its website, API, GitHub Actions, Pull Requests and authentication systems. The company said it was investigating performance issues after error rates rose across its web experience and API traffic.

According to GitHub's status page, the company began investigating the incident at 13:40 UTC. Error rates were reported at around 20% across the web experience and API traffic, while archive and raw repository content downloads recorded even higher error rates of approximately 50%.

Several authentication services were also affected. These included SAML, OIDC, SCIM and Team Sync, potentially preventing some users and organisations from accessing GitHub or managing accounts and teams.


Users reported server errors and difficulties loading repositories, commits and Pull Request pages. The disruption also affected GitHub Actions, with the service experiencing degraded performance that could impact automated builds, tests and deployments.

"We are experiencing high error rates around 20% for web experiences and api traffic. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads are experiencing an approximate 50% error rate. SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync are also impacted. We are currently performing mitigations and will post updates as we progress," read the latest update (at the time of writing this news).

GitHub Copilot also affected

The outage later extended to GitHub Copilot, the company's AI-powered coding assistant. At 14:31 UTC, GitHub reported that Copilot was experiencing degraded availability.

Other services, including Git Operations, Packages, Pages and Codespaces, were listed as operational at the time, although several critical parts of the platform remained degraded.

GitHub has not disclosed the cause of the outage. The company said its investigation was ongoing as it worked to restore affected services.

Users report GitHub problems

Downdetector also showed thousands of user reports about problems with GitHub on Monday morning, indicating that the disruption was affecting users at a broad scale.

GitHub is widely used by developers and organisations for software development, version control, code hosting, collaboration, Pull Requests, issue tracking and automated workflows. As a result, outages affecting core services such as repository access, authentication and GitHub Actions can disrupt development and deployment activities.

The incident remained under investigation, with GitHub yet to provide a definitive explanation for the widespread disruption.