Microsoft confirms GitHub is down worldwide

GitHub is down for some users as a widespread outage is causing errors across the website, API, Actions, Pull Requests, and several other services.

GitHub confirmed the outage at 9:40 AM EDT on August 17, 2026, when it said it was investigating reports of performance problems affecting some of its services.

The problems quickly spread across several parts of GitHub that developers rely on, including API Requests, Actions, Webhooks, Issues, and Pull Requests.

According to GitHub's status page, the company is seeing error rates of around 20% across its web experience and API traffic.

The outage appears to be even worse for some repository downloads

GitHub says archive downloads and raw repository content downloads are experiencing error rates of approximately 50%.

Likewise, authentication-related services are also having problems, with SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync affected by the incident.

Some users are running into server errors when trying to access GitHub, while others are reporting problems loading commits, repositories, and Pull Request pages.

GitHub Actions is also experiencing degraded performance, which means the outage can affect automated builds, tests, deployments, and other workflows that depend on GitHub's CI/CD platform.

At 10:31 AM EDT, GitHub confirmed that Copilot was also experiencing degraded availability, expanding the outage to its AI coding services.

Git Operations, Packages, Pages, and Codespaces are currently listed as operational, but several important parts of GitHub remain degraded.

GitHub has not disclosed what caused the outage and says its investigation is ongoing.

This is a developing story...

Update 1: At 11:42 AM EDT, GitHub said it is now performing mitigations. However, error rates remain around 20% for web experiences and API traffic, while archive and raw repository content downloads continue to see approximately 50% error rates.