Is GitHub down? › Outage history › Aug 20, 2026

GitHub outage on Aug 20, 2026: what happened

On Aug 20, 2026, the GitHub status page reported "Intermittent failures creating agent tasks". About 9 hours 54 min: from Aug 20, 2026, 14:43 UTC to Aug 21, 2026, 00:37 UTC, by the official start and resolution times.

Started

Aug 20, 2026, 14:43 UTC

Resolved

Aug 21, 2026, 00:37 UTC

Duration

9 hours 54 min

Official impact

Critical

Source

Intermittent failures creating agent tasks on the GitHub status page

The GitHub status page rated it "Critical", its highest impact level: an outage of the affected parts, not only slowness.

What caused the GitHub outage?

"The cause was a regional outage in a third-party cloud database service that Copilot uses to store agent task status."

From the GitHub status page, Aug 21, 2026, 00:37 UTC.

When was it fixed?

The GitHub status page marked it resolved at Aug 21, 2026, 00:37 UTC, 9 hours 54 min after it started. Its resolution note: "Between 13:57 UTC on August 20 and 00:37 UTC on August 21, 2026, some users of the Copilot Cloud Agent experienced delays of up to 60 to 90 minutes in seeing the status and results of their agent tasks. The agent tasks themselves continued to run and complete during this time; only the visibility ..."

Timeline of official updates

Every update the GitHub status page posted, oldest first. Times are UTC.

1. Aug 20, 2026, 14:43 UTC investigating

   We are investigating reports of impacted performance for some GitHub services.

2. Aug 20, 2026, 14:51 UTC investigating

   Users may experience delays when starting tasks using Copilot Cloud Agent. We are actively investigating the issue and will provide updates as we learn more.

3. Aug 20, 2026, 15:01 UTC investigating

   We have identified the problematic component and are working to fail over to a healthy instance. Further updates will be provided as we perform mitigations.

4. Aug 20, 2026, 15:41 UTC investigating

   We are experiencing issues with Copilot Cloud Agent tasks, resulting in newly started tasks not properly displaying on-going progress. These Copilot Cloud Agent tasks are still being completed correctly but lack proper visibility. We are actively investigating the issue and will provide updates as we learn more.

5. Aug 20, 2026, 16:14 UTC investigating

   Users are experiencing delays when starting tasks using Copilot Cloud Agent and are not be able to see the status of these tasks. Copilot Cloud Agent tasks are still being completed. We have identified the cause of the issue and are putting mitigations in place to return service to normal levels. We will provide another update about the expected recovery time shortly.

6. Aug 20, 2026, 17:05 UTC investigating

   We are seeing signs of recovery for Copilot Cloud Agent task status visibility, but this recovery is slower than anticipated. We are pursuing additional mitigating measures to accelerate recovery.

7. Aug 20, 2026, 17:32 UTC investigating

   We are observing gradual recovery for Copilot Cloud Agent task status visibility, with session output delayed approximately 1 hour. We have taken additional steps to accelerate the recovery and are continuing to monitor the impact.

8. Aug 20, 2026, 18:04 UTC investigating

   We are continuing to observe gradual recovery for Copilot Cloud Agent task status visibility, with session output delayed by approximately 1 hour. We have taken additional steps to accelerate the recovery and are continuing to monitor the impact.

9. Aug 20, 2026, 18:45 UTC investigating

   We are continuing to observe gradual recovery for Copilot Cloud Agent task status visibility, with session output delayed by approximately 1 hour. We have taken additional steps to accelerate the recovery and expect this to take effect within the next hour.

10. Aug 20, 2026, 19:35 UTC investigating

    We are continuing to observe gradual recovery for Copilot Cloud Agent task status visibility. Session output continues to be delayed by approximately 1 hour as our remediation steps take effect.

11. Aug 20, 2026, 20:37 UTC investigating

    We are seeing gradual recovery in Copilot Cloud Agent task status visibility as we deploy a fix for the root cause. Session output remains delayed by approximately one hour while remediation continues.

12. Aug 21, 2026, 00:37 UTC resolved

    Between 13:57 UTC on August 20 and 00:37 UTC on August 21, 2026, some users of the Copilot Cloud Agent experienced delays of up to 60 to 90 minutes in seeing the status and results of their agent tasks. The agent tasks themselves continued to run and complete during this time; only the visibility of their status was delayed. The cause was a regional outage in a third-party cloud database service that Copilot uses to store agent task status. We failed over the affected database to a healthy region, added processing capacity to work through the backlog, and restored normal operation once the underlying service recovered. No task data was lost during the incident. To prevent repetition of similar incidents, we are removing the database configuration that made us vulnerable to this regional outage and improving our database failover procedures.

GitHub outage questions

Other recent GitHub incidents

• Delays for Pull Requests and Webhook deliveries Oct 21, 2026, 14:52 UTC, 4 hours 30 min
• Degraded availability for GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages and Webhooks Oct 19, 2026, 15:49 UTC, 1 hour 8 min
• CCA Automations are delayed when starting an Automation Oct 15, 2026, 18:31 UTC, 24 minutes
• [Retroactive] Actions workflow run logs delayed Oct 14, 2026, 00:12 UTC, duration not stated
• Incident with Actions, Pull Requests and Issues Oct 12, 2026, 12:21 UTC, 7 hours 54 min
• Incident with Git Operations, Issues, Actions and Pull Requests Oct 7, 2026, 17:17 UTC, 48 minutes

Full GitHub outage history and biggest outages → · Recent outages across all services →

Quotes are the GitHub status page's own words, from the official incident. Is It Up or Down is independent and not affiliated with GitHub. Times are UTC.