GitHub Is Down in Latest Outage: API, Actions, Copilot and More Affected

GitHub is having a seriously rough afternoon. What started with specific service problems has turned into a widespread outage affecting developers, repositories, APIs, Copilot, and authentication.

GitHub outage quickly spreads across core services

The first official update was published at 13:41 UTC on August 17, when GitHub reported degraded availability for API Requests. Pull Requests, Issues, Actions, Webhooks, and Pages soon joined the list. By 14:24 UTC, GitHub confirmed roughly 20% error rates across numerous web experiences and API traffic. The company said it was investigating the root cause.

The outage then reportedly started affecting Copilot at 14:31 UTC. Pull Requests and Issues continued reporting problems, while Git Operations and Webhooks also degraded. After a while, GitHub reported a much wider impact. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads were seeing approximately 50% error rates.

Latest GitHub outage update points to a wider problem

GitHub’s latest update at 16:16 UTC says web experiences and API traffic are still seeing around 20% errors. Archive and raw repository downloads remain particularly affected at roughly 50%. Authentication and enterprise features are also caught up. GitHub says SAML, OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync are impacted.

The company says it is continuing mitigation efforts, but has not identified the root cause publicly. That leaves developers waiting while repositories, deployments, automation, and coding workflows remain unreliable.

User reports reinforce the scale of the disruption. Developers are reporting failed pull requests, missing repository content, broken commits, and Copilot problems.

At one point, Downdetector showed user reports spiking bove 2600. However, at the time of writing this the user reports has eased the bit. That also suggests, the outage is easing a bit and services are returning to normal.

This is a developing story…