Is GitHub Down Today? Official Outage Causes Terrible Disruption to 8 Services

Is GitHub down today? Yes, as of the latest confirmed update on August 17, 2026, GitHub is experiencing a widespread outage affecting multiple core services, leaving developers around the world struggling to access repositories, run builds, and review code. Here’s what’s confirmed so far, which services are affected, and what GitHub has said about it.

Is GitHub Down Today? What We Know So Far

GitHub officially confirmed it was investigating performance problems at 9:40 AM EDT on August 17, 2026, shortly after user reports began surging on DownDetector around 9:25 AM ET. More than 10,000 users had reported issues with the platform as of 8:12 AM PT, and as of the latest status update, the incident remains unresolved, with GitHub’s engineering teams actively investigating and applying mitigations.

Which GitHub Services Are Affected?

According to GitHub’s own status page, the following components were reported as degraded, in the order they were flagged:

• Copilot: Degraded Availability (14:31 UTC)
• Issues: Degraded Availability (14:49 UTC)
• Pull Requests: Degraded Availability (14:54 UTC)
• Actions: Degraded Availability (14:58 UTC)
• Webhooks: Degraded Availability (14:58 UTC)
• API Requests: Degraded Availability (15:01 UTC)
• Pages: Degraded Performance (15:10 UTC)
• Git Operations: Degraded Performance (15:21 UTC)

Authentication services, including SAML, OIDC, SCIM, and Team Sync, were also reported as impacted.

How Bad Is the Outage?

For anyone still asking is GitHub down today in terms of actual severity, not just component status, GitHub has reported error rates of around 20% across its general web experience and API traffic. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads have been hit even harder, with error rates of approximately 50%. That means a real chance of failure for anyone trying to download a repository archive or raw file directly during the outage window.

What’s Causing the GitHub Outage?

GitHub has not officially disclosed a root cause, and its investigation is still ongoing at the time of writing. Some reports have speculated that a database infrastructure issue may be behind the disruption, but this has not been confirmed by GitHub itself, so it should be treated as unverified for now.

How Is This Affecting Developers?

Anyone asking “is GitHub down today” from a developer’s chair already knows the practical answer: with Actions, Pull Requests, Issues, and API access all degraded at once, developers have been reporting difficulty loading commits, reviewing pull requests, running automated builds and deployments through GitHub Actions, and using GitHub Copilot. For teams that rely on GitHub Actions for continuous integration and deployment, this kind of multi-service outage can stall releases entirely until services recover.

Is This Part of a Bigger Pattern?

This isn’t an isolated incident. GitHub’s own status history logged 26 incidents in July 2026 alone, with six more recorded in just the first six days of August, and a separate GitHub Actions outage on August 6, 2026, lasted roughly 10 hours. Today’s outage adds to what has been a noticeably rough stretch of reliability issues for the platform this year.

Broader Tech Reliability Questions This Year

Large-scale technology infrastructure has been under a lot of scrutiny this year, our coverage of the L&T NVIDIA B300 AI Factory looks at the kind of massive compute buildout that global platforms increasingly depend on to stay reliable at scale.

Software platforms outside GitHub have had their own rough patches too, our coverage of the Android Canary 2608 update looks at a different corner of the developer and tech ecosystem going through its own changes this year. For real-time updates on this specific incident, GitHub’s official status page remains the most reliable source.

What Happens Next

If you’re checking back to see whether “is GitHub down today” still has the same answer, the situation could change quickly since this incident remains active as of the latest check, services may be restored, or new components could be affected before this is fully resolved. Developers are advised to keep an eye on GitHub’s official status page rather than relying on cached information, since outages like this one can evolve within minutes.

For more technology updates, check out our Technology section.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is GitHub down today?
Yes, as of the latest confirmed update on August 17, 2026, GitHub is experiencing a widespread outage affecting Actions, Pull Requests, Issues, API Requests, Webhooks, Copilot, Pages, and Git Operations.

When did the GitHub outage start?
User reports began surging around 9:25 AM ET, and GitHub officially confirmed it was investigating the issue at 9:40 AM EDT on August 17, 2026.

What is causing the GitHub outage?
GitHub has not officially disclosed a root cause. Some reports speculate a database infrastructure issue, though this remains unconfirmed.

Is GitHub down today for everyone or just some users?
The outage has affected a broad set of core services rather than a single feature, so most users interacting with Actions, Issues, Pull Requests, or Copilot are likely to notice some disruption.

How many people are affected by the GitHub outage?
More than 10,000 users had reported problems on DownDetector as of 8:12 AM PT, with error rates of around 20% for general traffic and roughly 50% for repository downloads.

Has GitHub had other outages recently?
Yes. GitHub logged 26 incidents in July 2026 and six more in the first six days of August, including a roughly 10-hour GitHub Actions outage on August 6, 2026.