Is GitHub down? › Outage history › Sep 13, 2026

GitHub outage on Sep 13, 2026: what happened

On Sep 13, 2026, the GitHub status page reported "Incident with several GitHub Services". About 1 hour 29 min: from Sep 13, 2026, 09:16 UTC to Sep 13, 2026, 10:44 UTC, by the official start and resolution times.

Started

Sep 13, 2026, 09:16 UTC

Resolved

Sep 13, 2026, 10:44 UTC

Duration

1 hour 29 min

Official impact

Critical

Affected

API Requests, Issues, Pull Requests, Actions, Pages

Source

Incident with several GitHub Services 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 an internal data-cleanup job that began writing to a shared database cluster at 07:33 UTC. Monitoring declared the incident at 08:50 UTC, but due to the broad impact and amplification from token creation, it took time to identify the source of the load."

From the GitHub status page, Sep 13, 2026, 10:44 UTC.

When was it fixed?

The GitHub status page marked it resolved at Sep 13, 2026, 10:44 UTC, 1 hour 29 min after it started. Its resolution note: "On September 13, 2026, between 08:43 and 10:44 UTC, GitHub experienced degraded availability across approximately 28 services, including Issues, Pull Requests, Actions, Codespaces, Pages, Notifications, Code Scanning, Git LFS, and new account signup. At peak, 8.8% of requests to create GitHub App ..."

Timeline of official updates

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

1. Sep 13, 2026, 09:16 UTC investigating

   We are investigating reports of degraded availability for API Requests, Issues, Pages and Pull Requests

2. Sep 13, 2026, 09:25 UTC investigating

   Actions is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.

3. Sep 13, 2026, 09:36 UTC investigating

   We're seeing increased database replication delays on collab which is causing increased error rates in authorization endpoints and follow-on increased error rates across the system - we are investigating

4. Sep 13, 2026, 10:26 UTC investigating

   We have reduced load on this cluster with internal load-shedding and are seeing signs of recovery but continue to monitor

5. Sep 13, 2026, 10:28 UTC investigating

   Pull Requests is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.

6. Sep 13, 2026, 10:44 UTC resolved

   On September 13, 2026, between 08:43 and 10:44 UTC, GitHub experienced degraded availability across approximately 28 services, including Issues, Pull Requests, Actions, Codespaces, Pages, Notifications, Code Scanning, Git LFS, and new account signup. At peak, 8.8% of requests to create GitHub App installation access tokens failed. Token issuance for Actions workflows was also affected, impacting approximately 4% of workflows during the incident time frame. Creating issues through the web interface failed for about 96% of attempts, and signup failures were above 90%. The cause was an internal data-cleanup job that began writing to a shared database cluster at 07:33 UTC. That cluster stores permission data read on nearly every authenticated request. The safeguard that was pacing the background job watched only one health signal - how far the database replicas were lagging - and that signal stayed low the whole time. It did not account for the load building on the primary itself, so the job kept writing while the primary quietly ran toward its limit. When the primary ran out of available connections, requests that needed it could not complete. First, there was no quick timeout on these database calls, so request handlers waited on the stalled database instead of failing fast, and the shared request-handling capacity degraded into site-wide errors. Second, a retry loop around token creation kept re-sending the writes that were already failing, which held the database saturated rather than letting it recover. Monitoring declared the incident at 08:50 UTC, but due to the broad impact and amplification from token creation, it took time to identify the source of the load. First responders mitigated by shedding internal load and pausing the job, and all services recovered by 10:44 UTC. To prevent recurrence, we are rate-limiting background jobs against shared, customer-serving databases by default, and adding automatic pausing and paging on primary-server load rather than replication lag alone. We are also surfacing running background work directly alongside database health signals so responders can see and pause it without leaving those dashboards, bounding retries in the token-issuing path, and adding request-level timeouts so one unhealthy database cannot consume shared web server capacity. In addition, we are breaking apart this database cluster to remove the single point of failure. We will be moving various service-specific data, including the ...

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.