alt Hacker NewsGitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability
Comments
All of the outages make sense to me as scaling issues. Each month, GitHub is getting the amount of commits they’d normally get in a year. And it’s growing
> Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.) GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week. So we're pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and strengthening GitHub’s core features. And as a fine purveyor of hand-crafted shit code for many years, I'm not gonna weigh in on that.
x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
5 hours going now and the entire thing is still completely down. This level of incompetence and their total disrespect for their customers is unbelievable.
At this point maybe they should consider sending out announcements when it is working instead
It's been hours :(
I have sympathy for the on-call team trying to resolve it, most of us have been there done that.
But seems something is systematically going wrong at GH
I love how even self hosted workers don't work during these outages - running jobs on their infrastructure being flakey is marginally acceptable, but the API to simply schedule workflows having this availability is mind boggling. Github just doesn't seem like a serious company anymore.
Can't wait for the Graphite/Cursor alternative (Origin) to become available. Actions being down for an hour in the middle of the US East workday is crazy. It's super frustrating to be an enterprise customer of Github, seems like we don't get any dedicated resources or additional stability. At this point our only option is self-host github enterprise or move away.
Given the recent history of outages, I wonder how many are seriously considering moving off GitHub for anything other than code hosting. I mean actions / workflows.
It would seem like GitHub is in a precarious situation.
We have many agents per employee working in parallel pushing way more commits than was humanly possible before AI, triggering GitHub actions a lot more than the workflows were built for, causing Actions costs to escalate (they really aren't cheap if you compare to hosting it yourself), meanwhile working with YAML workflows is just a pain, and just writing code would be so much more fun and AI compatible[1].
At the same time, GitHub has about ~3 different PR review UIs? And they're all half-bad? Any decently sized PR triggers their "optimized for large PRs" UI which jumps around randomly in my experience. If you don't get that UI and keep the scrolling one (there's an old and a new one btw) then god forbid you click a line number because at some point your browser will randomly scroll back to that line and it won't unstick. Now Linear[2] (and others) is replacing the PR review experience for the agentic era.
I'd love to see a solid AI first Git + CI + reviews.
[1] Cloudflare CI https://blog.cloudflare.com/ci-workflows/
[2] Linear PR reviews https://linear.app/changelog/2025-01-23-pull-request-reviews
It's not too hard to switch over from GitHub actions to other runners. For example, I wrote up the steps needed in order to use Hugging Face Jobs instead, which also enables GPU runners and other flavors. I use this for several of the repos I manage (such as Trackio):
It's cute that someone at GitHub had time to make their hamburger menu pancakes to promote stacked PRs, but nobody has time to make the platform stable.
Dealing with an incident on prod is extra difficult when your pipelines are not running.
This whole mess brought to like just now little moat there is left in the AI world.
Like, everyone talks about how you can just prompt a new CRM instead of paying for Salesforce.
But in this case, I raced with Fable and Sol and had time to build a full featured, fully functional CI/CD workflow system that has most of the features of GitHub actions (not the ecosystem obviously) and costs less than the GitHub runners per minute, while being able to scale to millions of workflows... And I had it working end to end before the outage was resolved and was already running my apps deploys through it.
It would take a little longer to do in a company with red tape and more investments in the GitHub ecosystem, and of course it only replaced actions. But it works.
There is no moat.
Incident number 6 for the month of August, notably on August 6th. This pattern does not bode well.
Soon we can start posting "GitHub {x} is up!" instead, that's becoming more news-worthy lol. I know they like to blame AI/scaling, but really they are owned by one of the main hyperscalers, so I find that excuse kind of weak..
On other occasions, I'd take this as a time to have a walk because I'm blocked. Unfortunately, I need to get some stuff out for a customer quickly. Can't do anything about that though. GitHub is the only product in it's size class that I use that has this kind of incredibly poor uptime.
I'd love to know what the most common root causes for these outages are.
I think this is because all frontier AI providers integrate with GitHub as a default git forge through their GitHub apps platform and their free tier is too generous. They should either charge some of these huge partners access to GitHub apps or partition the free tier off and have a different SLA.
If the frontier AI used GitLab as a default I'm sure they'd be the ones suffering now.
The speed at which GitHub is tanking their reputation is fascinating
Nothing like the old "everything is normal" to only be corrected 8 minutes later it is actually still down and then 2 hours later they are still working on it.
Aug 06, 2026 - 16:27 UTC - Update - Pages is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
Aug 06, 2026 - 16:19 UTC - Update - Pages is operating normally.
Does anyone recommend an alternative? We've already moved our runners to blacksmith, looking for a control plane as well. We are tiny startup that ships at high velocity and this kind of downtime is highly disruptive for us
There's a reason I'm browsing HN right now. Dead in the water.
In the news tomorrow: SpaceX's newest Grok model just got out of the sandbox and hacked into Github... Grok is so very very dangerous, their engineers only enter the server room in foil hats
I moved to a self-hosted Forgejo, with a self-hosted runner on another cheap Hetzner server. It's amazing how clean, snappy, and reliable it is.
This is unconscionable. It's an incredibly bad look to be up an entirety of a workday. When my company migrated from Bitbucket, I never thought that we'd be going to a worse service.
49199094 | GitHub Is Experiencing Difficulties | https://www.githubstatus.com/?d=2026/08/06 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49199094
I knew that when the build actions started failing en masse and my newly submitted PRs did not trigger the build actions at all (besides the mandatory one in my organization), it seemed logical to me to look at HN first..
Especially troublesome in the middle of trying to fix a high score security vulnerability when the release vehicle is Github.
The most likely explanation for the degraded reliability: Someone at GitHub saw the Three Body Problem last year and started shifting their infra over to Minecraft servers with "physical" memory and redstone logic gates.
WTF. Outage every month if not multiple. Even for paying enterprise plans.
Also, doesn't even have RAG offering.
I stopped using github for anything but git backups
latest server i set up is simply a bare repo + hooks to make a local deploy after running tests and shit
super easy to set up having ai do it, zero dependencies, deploy is still 'push it to the main'
i have several remotes for backups and stuff
How did they get Github Pages into “degraded performance”? Aren’t those just CDN stored static pages?
Time to rant... This is absolutely unreal.
Even self-hosted runners are impacted.... How can that be?
The cost of this globally has got to be in the hundreds of millions to companies that use CI/CD through GitHub Actions. What if prod is broken and GitHub actions is stalling the deployment of your hotfix? What if this makes your organization miss and SLA and diminish user trust? What if this makes you miss a release that you were contractually obligated to meet? This is happening during peak dev hours on a Thursday (not that it would be acceptable at any other time).
I don't understand how a service this critical to the global technical infrastructure can fail like this at all, let alone for more than a few hours. Like where's the backup generator for crises like these? You can't even use self-hosted runners? WTF? Like how can you not bring your own backup in a crisis event like this?
Not that Microsoft has a good reputation, but holy moly, you'd think they would prepare from something inevitable like this.
Did Microsoft fire all the people working on the GitHub features people actually use?
Just waiting for their Co pilot to fixes all bugs and misconfigurations, then they will have uptime above 100%
I was scratching my head wondering why my build file isnt working, ran a working project and it didn't build either. Figured out what might be the case, but wasted an hour.
I was complaining about how I should have used AI instead of manual brainwork for this instead but turns out that might have been the problem.
I noticed my CI throwing errors all of a sudden. I sure wish they would become more active in alerting folks or build it into these tools - especially as these occurrences are becoming more frequent. Possibly an API-accessible services status. Then, at least we could build in our own checks when we hit errors and not have to hunt down what all is broken.
This is going to sound crazy, but I kind of wish they went back to paid accounts. This would stop a lot of this.
I run a self-hosted Gitlab instance. 100% uptime with my own runners.
Either they had a good month or I'm off my game, I actually spent a minute checking if I did something wrong with actions instead of immediately going to HN to see if it was an outage.
YC plz fund all GH 2.0 ideas this batch
Did they try using Copilot to fix it??
I had tried downloading release assets of two different OSS that I use, and all requests failed.
It was before it became a news and a trend in X.
Really frustrating experience.
Is anyone seeing improvement - their last message implying a capacity problem would suggest some are actions are running?
More than ~~five~~seven hours is fucking offensive to me. I cannot believe it.
So, Github Actions is currently at two nines of uptime?
Claude is about to migrate me to Gitlab in about 5m
I am having their issues, also... Anyway this guys are great!
Very frustrating, nothing more I can add at this point.
I'm surprised this still passes as news, gives water is wet vibes at this point.
This seems persistent and endemic, have they said anything about why it's been so bad and what they are going to doing to improve going forward?
I don't think this portents anything great for software in general.
We're a good year+ into the use LLMs for all major bits of software that we all rely upon and GitHub here is down to one 9 of uptime. I've been using GitHub for a _long_ time, my first commits there go back to August 2009!, and I honestly don't recall GitHub going down as much as it has in the last year.
I'm sure there's other things happening in the background, but I can not help but believe that this is directly correlated with the increase of LLM usage.
Though I would love to hear someone else's pet theory how a rock of the internet went from four+ nines of uptime to maybe one.