GitHub suffered a major outage on August 17, 2026, beginning around 9:40 a.m. Eastern Time, resulting in degraded performance and error rates of about 20% on web and API traffic and 50% on archive and raw content downloads [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. The disruption impacted users worldwide, with reports coming from regions including India, Brazil, and Bulgaria [2].
During the outage, GitHub's official status page did not initially reflect the incident, frustrating users who turned to external forums like Hacker News for confirmation [1, 2]. GitHub acknowledged the problems later in the morning, stating, "We are experiencing high error rates around 20 percent for web experiences and API traffic. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads are experiencing an approximate 50 percent error rate. We are currently performing mitigations based on our investigation thus far and are monitoring for improvement" [5].
At the peak, outage reports on DownDetector reached nearly 3,000 before declining to a few hundred by 12:45 p.m. EDT as mitigation steps took effect [4, 6]. Around 11:42 a.m. EDT, GitHub reported the steady error rates and ongoing remediation efforts [3, 5]. By 12:36 p.m. EDT, the platform announced it had identified the problematic component and implemented a fix, but said the service had not yet fully recovered [4].
Alongside GitHub, other Microsoft-owned services like Copilot and Microsoft Teams saw minor outages or upticks in error reports during the same period [4, 5]. GitHub hosts about 180 million developers globally and has recently expanded rapidly thanks to growing AI coding workflows [4].
The persistent reliability issues stirred frustration in the developer community, with some discussing alternatives to GitHub following the outage [2, 7, 6]. GitHub has not publicly disclosed a detailed root cause beyond referencing a "problematic component" fixed during the incident [4, 5].
GitHub continues working to fully restore service and stabilize the platform after today’s outage.
