GitHub Experiences Major Outage Affecting Core Development Services

GitHub experienced a significant service disruption on February 9, 2026, that impacted core development workflows for millions of users worldwide. The incident, which began around 19:01 UTC, affected multiple critical services including GitHub Actions, Git operations, Issues, Pull Requests, Packages, Pages, Webhooks, and Codespaces, causing slow responses, failed requests, and delayed CI/CD jobs across the platform.

The outage was first detected when users began reporting issues with Actions, Git operations, and Issues. Within minutes, GitHub's status page reflected the growing scope of the problem, with additional services like Pull Requests, Packages, Pages, and Webhooks showing degraded performance. The impact was particularly severe for development teams relying on GitHub Actions for their continuous integration and deployment pipelines, as jobs were delayed and builds failed during the incident.

As the situation evolved, GitHub engineers worked to identify and address the root cause. By 19:29 UTC, the team reported applying mitigations and observing signs of recovery, though several services remained affected. The incident's complexity became apparent as different services recovered at different rates - some services returned to normal operation while others, including Dependabot, Actions, and Codespaces, continued experiencing issues.

The recovery process was gradual but steady. GitHub reported that a number of services had recovered by 19:54 UTC, though investigation into remaining issues continued. The platform's status page showed a mix of recovered and degraded services throughout the incident, with Codespaces experiencing degraded performance even as other services normalized.

Full recovery was achieved by 20:09 UTC, when GitHub confirmed that Actions, Codespaces, Git Operations, Issues, Packages, Pages, Pull Requests, and Webhooks were all operating normally. The company thanked users for their patience and understanding while the issue was being addressed.

This outage highlights the critical nature of GitHub's infrastructure to modern software development. With millions of developers and organizations depending on GitHub for version control, CI/CD, and collaborative development, even brief disruptions can have cascading effects across the software industry. The incident affected not just code hosting but the entire development lifecycle, from pull requests and code reviews to automated testing and deployment.

GitHub has committed to sharing a detailed root cause analysis once available, which will likely provide insights into what caused the widespread failure and what measures are being implemented to prevent similar incidents in the future. Such post-incident analyses are crucial for maintaining transparency and trust with the developer community, especially given the platform's central role in modern software development workflows.

For developers and organizations affected by the outage, the incident serves as a reminder of the importance of having contingency plans for critical development infrastructure. While GitHub's status page provided regular updates throughout the incident, the multi-hour duration of the outage would have impacted development schedules, release timelines, and potentially even production deployments for some teams.

The incident also underscores the interconnected nature of modern development platforms, where issues in one service can potentially impact others. The fact that Actions, Git operations, and Issues were all affected suggests a common underlying cause rather than isolated service failures.

As GitHub continues to be the backbone of open-source and enterprise software development, incidents like this highlight both the platform's importance and the challenges of maintaining such a complex, globally-distributed system. The swift resolution and transparent communication throughout the incident demonstrate GitHub's commitment to maintaining service reliability, even as the scale and complexity of their infrastructure continue to grow.