Latest GitHub outage squeezes Actions, Pages to death

GitHub's automation platform, Actions, and its hosting service Pages are currently experiencing significant stability issues, according to the service's status site. This is the latest in a series of stability problems the platform has faced. First reported on Thursday at 1522 UTC, Actions experienced "degraded performance," followed by 20 minutes later with degraded availability.

Workflow runs failed to start or were interrupted mid-execution, and requests to the Actions REST API returned errors. Users also encountered unexpected rate limits.

Engineers have implemented several mitigations, and a further fix is being rolled out across all affected systems. The company acknowledged affected systems including Copilot code review, the coding agent, hosted runners, and migrations using GitHub Enterprise Importer, as well as potential delays in Webhook deliveries. This issue comes on the heels of several recent outages, with the status history page revealing a concerning trend.

In July alone, there was a similar Actions outage, and a string of incidents throughout June, May, and April. As of August 6, six incidents have already been logged for the month.

The frequency of these outages has led many developers to reconsider hosting their projects on GitHub, with some even calling it a platform unsuitable for "serious work." In April, GitHub apologized for the ongoing string of outages, stating that AI usage was stressing its systems. The company promised structural improvements in June, but these changes do not seem to have made a difference according to the status history since then. Contacted for more information on the latest issue, GitHub did not respond.