GitHub down in major worldwide outage, thousands of developers hit

GitHub is hit by a major worldwide outage early Monday morning, impacting thousands of developers and disrupting multiple services across the popular developer platform, including Copilot, Pull Requests, Actions, and Git Operations.

According to Microsoft Live Site Event details, the GitHub outage has spread across the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa.

GitHub outage hits worldwide

It all started at 9:20 a.m. Eastern Time, when users began reporting performance issues across more than a dozen GitHub services. The code hosting platform began investigating the outage about 20 minutes later.

“We are experiencing high error rates around 20% for web experiences and api traffic.

Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads are experiencing an approximate 50% error rate. Investigations are on-going into the root cause,”

GitHub wrote in one of its many website and X status updates.

GitHub Copilot also goes down

GitHub is one of the world's largest software development platforms, allowing developers and organizations to host, manage, collaborate on, and distribute software projects and source code.

An outage hitting several core developer workflows can interfere with tasks such as pushing and pulling code, reviewing and merging changes, tracking bugs, and automating software builds, testing, and deployments.

GitHub Copilot, the platform’s AI coding assistant, is also experiencing major disruptions as the company scrambles to implement a fix.

Although the Microsoft status page shows Copilot currently “operating normally,” multiple developers noted the AI service has also “been hard down for 4 hours now.”

“Please report on the ongoing Copilot 'major outage.' This isn't just 'residual impact in the form of sporadic authentication failures' for Copilot. It's down.”

one frustrated developer posted on X.

“Bruh, my whole day is basically gone. Not a good look,” another commented.

bruh, my whole day is basically gone. Not a good look.

undefined SirSimpalot🐻🎻|🍪 |🐯⚙️|🎮🌊|🐺🎖 (@SirSimpalot_) August 17, 2026

Another developer whose GitHub services did come back online simply posted, “Working for me now. GitHub got its Monday blues, right?”

GitHub services hit across the board

According to the platform, the full list of impacted GitHub services includes:

• GitHub Copilot
• Pull Requests
• Issues
• Actions
• Git Operations
• Pages and Webhooks
• API traffic
• Repository downloads
• Authentication and team-management services

Authentication-related impacts include SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync, the company further reported.

Internet monitoring site Downdetector shows a peak of 2,745 user reports in the US around 9:30 a.m.

Of the users, 73% reported issues with the website. Another 15% reported problems with the app, while 12% had trouble logging in.

Downdetector showed similar spikes across Canada, the UK, and the EU.

GitHub says recovery is underway

By 12:30 p.m. GitHub finally announced that it had identified the issue as “a problematic component” and it had taken corrective action, with “strong signs of recovery,” although some error rates remained slightly elevated.

“The degradation affecting API Requests, Actions, Git Operations, Issues, Pages, Pull Requests, and Webhooks has been mitigated. We are monitoring to ensure stability,” it said.

However, more than an hour after mitigation techniques had been applied, GitHub was forced to backtrack on its previous update, stating that some services, including Git Operations and Issues, were still “experiencing degradation.”

GitHub has not revealed what the "problematic component" was, what failed, or what triggered the outage.

“We are still seeing residual impact in the form of sporadic authentication failures. We are continuing to apply additional mitigations and investigate the remaining impact,” the company said.

Cybernews will continue monitoring the outage and update this story as more information becomes available.