# GitHub Copilot: Actions failures to download (401 Unauthorized)

> GitHub Copilot status incident “Actions failures to download (401 Unauthorized)” on 2026-03-12: impact minor (vendor’s label), 1.3 h, 1 update(s). Archived by Rewindex.

Canonical: https://rewindex.com/company/github-copilot/incidents/02z04m335tvv
Last updated: 2026-03-12T06:02:00Z

- Impact (vendor’s label): minor
- Status: resolved
- Started: 2026-03-12 04:46 UTC · Resolved: 2026-03-12 06:02 UTC · Duration: 1.3 h
- Updates: 1
- [Vendor status page: https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/02z04m335tvv](https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/02z04m335tvv)
- [Company: GitHub Copilot](https://rewindex.com/company/github-copilot.md)

## Timeline of updates

- **resolved** 2026-03-12 06:02 UTC: On March 12, 2026 between 02:30 and 06:02 UTC some GitHub Apps were unable to mint server to server tokens, resulting in 401 Unauthorized errors. During the outage window, ~1.3% of requests resulted in 401 errors incorrectly. This manifested in GitHub Actions jobs failing to download tarballs, as well as failing to mint fine-grained tokens. During this period, approximately 5% of Actions jobs were impacted The root cause was a failure with the authentication service’s token cache layer, a newly created secondary cache layer backed by Redis – caused by Kubernetes control plane instability, leading to an inability to read certain tokens which resulted in 401 errors. The mitigation was to fallback reads to the primary cache layer backed by mysql. As permanent mitigations, we have made changes to how we deploy redis to not rely on the Kubernetes control plane and maintain service availability during similar failure modes. We also improved alerting to reduce overall impact time from similar failures.

_From the vendor’s published history: only the final update text is available for incidents before Rewindex began polling this page._

## Cite this

Status incident (vendor impact label: minor) posted by GitHub Copilot, started 2026-03-12 04:46 UTC, resolved after 1.3 h, 1 update(s).

- Canonical URL: https://rewindex.com/company/github-copilot/incidents/02z04m335tvv
- Citation: GitHub Copilot, “Actions failures to download (401 Unauthorized)” (2026-03-12 04:46 UTC). Archived by Rewindex: https://rewindex.com/company/github-copilot/incidents/02z04m335tvv (CC BY 4.0).
- Markdown link: `[GitHub Copilot: Actions failures to download (401 Unauthorized) (2026-03-12)](https://rewindex.com/company/github-copilot/incidents/02z04m335tvv)`


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Canonical: https://rewindex.com/company/github-copilot/incidents/02z04m335tvv · Markdown: https://rewindex.com/company/github-copilot/incidents/02z04m335tvv.md · JSON: https://rewindex.com/api/v1/companies/github-copilot/incidents/02z04m335tvv · Data licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) · Generated 2026-11-04T14:35:24.602Z