Changes / GitHub Copilot / Intermittent failures creating agent tasks
GitHub Copilot: Critical incident: Intermittent failures creating agent tasks
Summary
GitHub Copilot reported a critical incident starting 2026-08-20 14:43 UTC, resolved 2026-08-21 00:37 UTC (9 h 54 min). Some Copilot Cloud Agent users saw task status/results delayed up to 60–90 minutes, while tasks continued running and completing. GitHub cited a regional third-party cloud database outage and deployed a fix.
Machine-written from the diff below (Sol; type: incident degradation). Check the diff before relying on it.
What changed
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After: Intermittent failures creating agent tasks
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After: critical
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After: resolved
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After: 2026-08-20 14:43 UTC
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After: 2026-08-21 00:37 UTC
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After: We are investigating reports of impacted performance for some GitHub services.
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After: 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.
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After: 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.
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After: 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.
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After: 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.
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After: 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.
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After: 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.
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After: 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.
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After: 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.
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After: 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.
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After: 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.
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After: 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.
First version of this incident archived by Rewindex. View the live incident.
History of this incident
| When (UTC) | Change | Kind |
|---|---|---|
| Critical incident: Intermittent failures creating agent tasks (this change) GitHub Copilot reported a critical incident starting 2026-08-20 14:43 UTC, resolved 2026-08-21 00:37 UTC (9 h 54 min). Some Copilot Cloud Agent users saw task status/results delayed up to 60–90 minutes, while tasks continued running and completing. GitHub cited a regional third-party cloud database outage and deployed a fix. | Major incident |
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