GitHub hit by widespread outage, breaking builds and logins for hours

Key points

• GitHub confirmed a widespread outage at 9:40 AM EDT on August 17, 2026, affecting the website, API, Actions, Pull Requests and more.
• Error rates hit roughly 20% across the web experience and API traffic, with archive and raw content downloads failing about 50% of the time.
• Login services including SAML, OIDC, SCIM and Team Sync were degraded, locking some users out.
• GitHub Copilot, the AI coding assistant, joined the outage list at 10:31 AM EDT.
• GitHub hasn't said what caused the incident and the investigation is ongoing.

GitHub, the Microsoft-owned site where millions of developers store and share code, went sideways on Monday morning. For several hours, people trying to open a project page or run automated tests hit errors.

The company confirmed the trouble at 9:40 AM EDT on August 17, 2026, saying it was looking into performance problems across some services. Within the hour the list of broken things had grown considerably. It came less than a day after we reported on Anthropic's own authentication failures across Claude.ai on 16 August, a reminder of how quickly major platform outages have been clustering.

What actually broke?

Almost everything developers touch daily. GitHub's status page put the error rate at about 20% across the website and its API, the connection other tools use to talk to GitHub automatically.

Downloads were worse: archive downloads and raw repository content were failing roughly half the time.

Logins were a significant part of the pain. SAML and OIDC authentication, along with SCIM and Team Sync, were all degraded. Those are the systems large organisations use to sign staff into GitHub through corporate accounts. When they wobble, whole engineering teams get locked out simultaneously.

Users reported server errors when opening the site, and broken pages for commits and Pull Requests, the workspaces where code changes get reviewed before going live.

GitHub Actions, the service that automatically builds and tests code every time a developer saves a change, was running slowly, meaning release pipelines at countless companies stalled. At 10:31 AM EDT the company added GitHub Copilot, its AI coding assistant that suggests code as you type, to the degraded list.

Git Operations, Packages, Pages and Codespaces were still listed as operational.

Was this a cyberattack?

There's no evidence of one. GitHub hasn't disclosed a cause, and outages spread across many internal services at once most often trace back to a configuration change or a shared internal dependency failing. That's speculation, not attribution.

As first reported by BleepingComputer, the company's investigation was still ongoing at the time of publication. Until GitHub posts a post-incident review, treat any cause circulating on social media as unconfirmed.

What should developers and companies do?

Check the status page rather than retrying blindly. Hammering a struggling service with retries usually slows recovery.

If your continuous integration jobs failed during the window, re-run them once GitHub reports green. Staff who couldn't sign in through single sign-on hit the SAML and OIDC issue, not a password problem.

Should you worry about platform concentration?

A very large share of modern software depends on a small number of platforms staying up. When GitHub goes down, release trains at banks, hospitals and startups pause together. That's the real story here, not the outage itself but the systemic exposure it keeps exposing.

This is a developing story and will be updated as GitHub shares more.