GitHub Actions Is Having One of the Worst Days in Its History
I've been working on an update to BetterTrafficLaws, a GTA 5 mod I maintain - a few bug fixes, a couple of new features, and a performance improvement I was reasonably pleased with. All of it done, tested, and ready to tag.
Except nothing runs. No workflow, no build, no release. Nothing urgent about it, but there's a slight irritation in having the work finished and not being able to ship it the normal way.
And it turns out I picked a historic day to try.
GitHub Actions went into major outage at 15:22 UTC on August 6, and as I write this it is still going. Webhook triggers are throttled - GitHub is processing roughly 15% of them - so pushes and pull requests quietly don't start anything at all. Runners are being handed jobs that no longer exist. Both hosted and self-hosted are affected. Of the jobs that do get queued, about 65% are succeeding, which is an improvement on the 30-40% earlier on. The blast radius reaches past Actions too - Pages deploys, Copilot code review, Enterprise Importer migrations, webhook delivery.
August 2026 is already down to 95.68% uptime, and the month is a week old.
The counter is still moving. As of that screenshot it reads 5 hours 57 minutes of major outage against August 6, plus 52 minutes of partial. It's past midnight here in CET and the number is still climbing against yesterday's square, because the incident never ended.
I went through the Actions uptime calendar by hand out of curiosity, month by month, all the way back. In the entire history of the service, exactly one major outage has run longer: 8 hours and 11 minutes on 16 May 2021. That's it. That's the only day that was worse. If today's outage runs another two hours and fifteen minutes, it takes the record.
The reigning champion, 16 May 2021 - 8 hrs 11 mins.
That one has a wonderfully simple cause, and GitHub published it. Per their May 2021 availability report, "a foreign key for scoped tokens exceeded max INT32." They ran out of integers. 2,147,483,647 of them, and then no more, taking Actions, Pages, the API, and scoped-token push and pull down with it. The fix was a long-running schema migration to INT64 - which is exactly as slow as it sounds, and why the whole thing ran 9 hours and 48 minutes end to end.
There are a handful of partial outages that beat this one on raw duration, some over ten hours. But for a full major outage, we are watching second place in the entire history of GitHub Actions happen live.
Worth putting next to that. GitHub's COO stated back in April that Actions had gone from 500M minutes a week in 2023, to 1B a week in 2025, to 2.1B in a single week this spring. Commits are on the same curve - a billion across all of 2025, now 275 million every week. His own framing was that they're "pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and strengthening GitHub's core features."
A rise that steep is largely the result of development with agents, and Actions is where that lands - every agent run wants a build, a test suite, a green check.
To be clear, that's context, not a diagnosis. GitHub hasn't said what caused today's outage, and they usually don't until the monthly availability report lands weeks later. It could be capacity. It could just as easily be a bad deploy on a Thursday, which is what most outages are, who knows.
Still, if load does turn out to be the cause, both record outages come down to the same thing - GitHub growing faster than one of its own limits. In 2021 it was a database column. Today it would be the scheduler.
That's the whole post, really. No lesson, no hot take about vendor lock-in that you haven't already heard, and I'm not going to pretend a delayed mod release is a business continuity event. It just seemed worth writing down while it's still happening: for the better part of a day now, an enormous share of the world's software cannot be built or shipped, because one company's job scheduler keeps handing its runners work that doesn't exist anymore.
We are all, collectively, waiting on the same green checkmark.
Anyway. The mod update is done and sitting there. I'm going to sleep - I'll check in the morning and find out whether this one is still in second place.
Update
It's over, and second place holds.
GitHub marked the incident resolved at 02:04 UTC. The final count for August 6 is 7 hours 26 minutes of major outage plus 52 minutes of partial - which leaves it 45 minutes short of the May 2021 record.
The final numbers, and August 2026 settles at 95.36%.
No root cause yet. GitHub says "a detailed root cause analysis will be shared as soon as it is available," so whether load had anything to do with it is still an open question.