GitHub's January 2026 Outages: Copilot Failures and Infrastructure Challenges

GitHub has published its January 2026 availability report, detailing two significant incidents that impacted service reliability across its platform. The outages affected both AI-powered features and core infrastructure, highlighting the complex challenges of maintaining large-scale developer tools.

Copilot Outage Disrupts AI-Assisted Development

The first incident occurred on January 13, 2026, when GitHub Copilot experienced a 46-minute service outage that began at 09:25 UTC. During this period, users encountered error rates averaging 18%, with some requests failing completely at 100% error rates. The outage specifically impacted chat features across multiple Copilot interfaces, including Copilot Chat, VS Code integration, JetBrains IDEs, and other dependent products.

The root cause was traced to a configuration error introduced during a model update. GitHub's initial mitigation involved rolling back the problematic change, but recovery was complicated by external factors. The secondary recovery phase extended until 10:46 UTC due to upstream provider OpenAI experiencing degraded availability for their GPT-4.1 model.

This incident underscores the interconnected nature of modern AI services, where issues can cascade across multiple providers and affect various development tools simultaneously. For developers relying on AI assistance for coding tasks, such outages can significantly disrupt workflow and productivity.

Infrastructure Update Causes Widespread Service Degradation

The second, more severe incident occurred on January 15, lasting 1 hour and 40 minutes from 16:40 to 18:20 UTC. This outage had broader impact, affecting issues, pull requests, notifications, Actions, repositories, API endpoints, account login, and an internal service called Alive that powers live updates on GitHub.

During the incident, an average of 1.8% of combined web and API requests failed, with brief spikes reaching 10% failure rates early in the incident. Interestingly, unauthenticated users experienced the majority of impact, though authenticated users were also affected.

The cause was traced to an infrastructure update applied to GitHub's data stores. The upgrade to a new major version introduced unexpected resource contention, leading to slow queries and increased timeouts across services dependent on these datasets. GitHub mitigated the issue by rolling back to the previous stable version.

Lessons Learned and Future Improvements

In response to these incidents, GitHub has outlined several improvement initiatives. For the Copilot outage, the company is implementing stronger monitoring systems, improved test environments, and tighter configuration safeguards. These measures aim to prevent similar configuration errors and accelerate detection and mitigation of future issues.

For the infrastructure-related incident, GitHub is focusing on enhancing its validation process for major upgrades. The goal is to catch issues that only manifest under high load before full release, improve detection time, and reduce mitigation times in the future.

Context and Industry Implications

These outages come at a time when developer tools are increasingly critical to software development workflows. GitHub's platform serves millions of developers worldwide, making reliability essential for maintaining productivity across the software industry.

The incidents also highlight the growing complexity of modern development platforms. As services become more interconnected and dependent on external AI providers, the potential for cascading failures increases. This complexity requires sophisticated monitoring, testing, and incident response capabilities.

Looking Ahead

GitHub notes that incidents occurring on February 9, 2026, will be covered in next month's availability report. The company continues to emphasize transparency through its status page, which provides real-time updates and post-incident recaps.

For developers, these incidents serve as a reminder of the importance of understanding service dependencies and having contingency plans for when critical tools experience downtime. While GitHub works to improve its reliability, the software development community continues to rely heavily on these platforms for daily work.