Incident with Actions

I recently got annoyed with the amount I was paying on actions for a single repo. And decided to use a Mac mini that I had lying around to become the sole self-hosted runner for that repository instead.

It was ridiculously easy to set up, reduced my issues with GitHub significantly and the mini will literally pay for itself 3-4x over this year with the $$$ I'm saving not paying for GH actions.

The most surprising part for me was not the cost savings, but that all my workflow runtimes went down by about 70-80%.

We all know that AI is compounding the problem, but I wonder how much of it is actually AI writing extremely overly-complex (and likely inefficient) CI pipelines for vibe coders who have absolutely no idea what CI is or why they would need it. I'm sure the AI makes all sorts of great arguments to the user about why they need it and the user, none the wiser, blindly accepts it all. Why wouldn't they? It costs them absolutely nothing on an OSS repo.

I know that frontier models (Astra, Fable, Opus 5.5) at some point always end up writing a test that unnecessarily elongates CI. I've seen everything from literal sleep calls in a test unit to arbitrarily deciding a test needs to download a 100MB file to prove something works. As a engineer, I catch these, but a vibe coder has no idea there's probably hundreds of these in their code making CI take 10-20 minutes. Hell, they probably don't even click the "Actions" tab.

What a mess.

Interestingly all the separate enterprise cloud instances show the same thing:

https://us.githubstatus.com/posts/details/P7VGB7I

https://au.githubstatus.com/posts/details/PO54BK8

https://eu.githubstatus.com/posts/details/PRESCZY

https://jp.githubstatus.com/posts/details/P0N7ZG5

What's the point of (supposedly) separate and isolated data residency deployments if they all have single point of failure?

GH Actions problems are so frequent that they are really not newsworthy anymore. Most of the time they don't even show up on the status page because they seem to be completely random (e.g. manually cancelling and restarting may resolve the issue).

It would result in a lot less noise if we got updates for when GitHub is up!

> We continue to monitor for full recovery and are working to mitigate ongoing issues affecting other services, including access to repository lists, licensing, and billing pages

Those issues affecting other services are not visible anywhere else on the status page, are they?

I moved my CI to a runner on my Forgejo (using a cheap Hetzner server) and it works beautifully and reliably.

It has never been easier to setup Proxmox, Kubernetes, and Actions Runner Controller (ARC) to do your own CI on old hardware you might otherwise recycle.

GH nine sixes strikes again

I moved my CI runners to Bunny recently, and not only is it cheaper, but it's much faster as well.

With all these problems, it would be interesting to understand what incentivises GitHub to continue to offer 2000 free GHA minutes per month for private repos.

My company switched to a different provider for our action runners partly for reliability reasons. Despite that, jobs still aren't being dispatched.

Nice to see that the companies pushing for AI get to feel the suffer from AI.

CI stands for Continuous Idling ....

At this point, a hole in the market is open for a competitor offering a private SaaS solution. The downward trend has had a long tail, but these outages seem to have become business as usual for GitHub in 2026.

I came here to read a knock down drag out flaming fundamental indictment of the entire GitHub Actions ideology and the horse it rode in on, and all I got was this incident report.

Write it in Rust!!!

And water is wet

Color me shocked