Changes / GitHub Copilot / Incident with Actions
GitHub Copilot: Major incident: Incident with Actions
Summary
GitHub reported a major Actions outage starting 2026-08-18 09:36 UTC, resolved at 10:23 UTC (46 min). Its update separately cited 05:02 UTC–11:30 UTC: customers could not run Actions Larger Runners jobs or view/manage Actions Runners and Runner Groups through the GitHub UI/API. The vendor attributed this to failed backend requests resolving essential metadata.
Machine-written from the diff below (Sol; type: incident outage). Check the diff before relying on it.
What changed
Before: not present
After: Incident with Actions
Before: not present
After: major
Before: not present
After: resolved
Before: not present
After: 2026-08-18 09:36 UTC
Before: not present
After: 2026-08-18 10:23 UTC
Before: not present
After: We are investigating reports of impacted performance for some GitHub services.
Before: not present
After: On August 18, 2026, between 05:02 UTC and 11:30 UTC, customers were unable to run jobs on Actions Larger Runners and were unable to view or manage Actions Runners and Runner Groups through the GitHub UI and API. <br /><br />These issues were caused by failures in backend requests resolving essential metadata for starting Larger Runner workflow runs and for reading runner and runner group data. The failures were caused by an expired authentication certificate unique to this service. The certificate had been rotated in KeyVault, but a step to enable use at runtime had been paused to prevent recurrence of previous incidents that had been triggered by this operation. <br /><br />We mitigated the issues by completing the enablement of the new certificate in the backend system. We have added additional monitoring to this and other certificates. The relevant service is also in the process of being replaced as part of our availability and scale work, bringing this authentication path and secret management in line with patterns across all GitHub services.
First version of this incident archived by Rewindex. View the live incident (opens in new tab).
History of this incident
| When (UTC) | Change | Kind |
|---|---|---|
| Major incident: Incident with Actions (this change) GitHub reported a major Actions outage starting 2026-08-18 09:36 UTC, resolved at 10:23 UTC (46 min). Its update separately cited 05:02 UTC–11:30 UTC: customers could not run Actions Larger Runners jobs or view/manage Actions Runners and Runner Groups through the GitHub UI/API. The vendor attributed this to failed backend requests resolving essential metadata. | Major incident |
All GitHub Copilot changes → · GitHub Copilot profile · Markdown · JSON