GitHub is down again, and this time it's hitting almost everything

GitHub is currently grappling with a major outage that has disrupted numerous services relied upon by developers. The Microsoft-owned platform acknowledged the issue at 13:40 UTC on Monday and is investigating reports of performance problems across several of its services. Initial reports indicate degraded API Requests and Actions, followed by Webhooks, Issues, and Pull Requests. The disruption is extensive but not a complete GitHub blackout.

Error rates are reported at around 20% for the web interface and API traffic, while archive downloads and raw repository content are failing at rates nearing 50%. Additionally, Copilot has joined the list of affected services, while GitHub Pages has experienced degraded performance. Git Operations, Packages, and Codespaces remain operational as of now.

This widespread outage highlights how much GitHub has expanded beyond merely hosting source code. Actions handles automated testing and deployments, Webhooks link GitHub to external services, Pull Requests facilitate code review, and GitHub's APIs are embedded in many development tools. Even when fundamental Git operations continue working, failures elsewhere can effectively stall an organization's software pipeline.

The incident comes amid rising concerns about GitHub's reliability. In July alone, GitHub recorded eight incidents that degraded its services, following nine in May and six in June. Just over a week ago, GitHub Actions experienced a particularly prolonged disruption, with workflow runs failing or remaining queued for hours. In response, the company described the issue as unacceptable and announced its accelerated efforts to enhance isolation and resilience within Actions.

Furthermore, GitHub is continuing a broader infrastructure migration towards Azure aimed at reducing shared failure points and making individual outages more manageable. This makes Monday's broad failure particularly unfortunate, as it has simultaneously affected APIs, authentication, collaboration tools, automation, and AI services. However, GitHub has not yet disclosed the root cause of this latest disruption.