www.it-connect.fr
Monday, August 17, 2026: Microsoft Confirms a Global GitHub Outage
With 20% error rates on web pages and the API, and up to 50% on repository downloads, GitHub is in rough shape this Monday, August 17, 2026, as this global outage has affected many features for more than two hours. Here is what we know.
If you use GitHub, whether as a contributor or simply to fetch a project’s source code, you may have run into difficulties today. Indeed, since 13:40 UTC (15:40 in France), an incident ticket has been opened at GitHub following performance issues reported by users.
In less than twenty minutes, the list of affected components kept growing, service after service. API Requests at 13:41, Actions at 13:42, Webhooks at 13:44, Issues at 13:46, then Pull Requests at 13:58. In other words, just about everything a development team needs to work normally on GitHub is down.
This outage is also clearly visible on Downdetector :
20% errors on the web, 50% on repository downloads
According to the official status page, the error rate is around 20% on web interfaces and API traffic. It rises to around 50% on archive downloads and raw repository content, which is notably consumed by installation scripts, Docker images being built, and pipelines fetching sources from raw.githubusercontent.com. Given how massively popular GitHub is worldwide, this is quite a mess.
At 14:24 UTC, GitHub even expanded the scope of the incident to another component: authentication. "SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync are also affected. The investigation is ongoing and we will continue to keep you updated as we learn more.", we can read. For a company accessing GitHub through its identity provider, this likely translates into login errors.
At 14:31 UTC, Copilot also moved to degraded availability. Microsoft’s AI coding assistant has therefore joined the list. GitHub’s functional building blocks are falling one after another... eventually impacting the entire CI/CD stack associated with GitHub Actions. Even so, not everything is broken: Git operations are not considered affected.
Some users report server errors when loading commits, repositories, and pull request pages. This is notably the case for Mehdi Dakhama, one of the IT-Connect editors, who sent me the screenshot below.
At 14:58 UTC (16:58 in France), GitHub said it was applying mitigation measures based on its investigation. The goal now is to see whether the situation improves or not. The root cause, however, has not been disclosed.
The incident was still ongoing at the time of writing.... You can follow the latest developments on this page. Have you been affected by this GitHub outage on Monday, August 17, 2026?
