GitHub Down Worldwide? Users Hit Errors as Pull Requests and Actions Stop Working

GitHub suffered a widespread outage Monday, Aug. 17, disrupting pull requests, GitHub Actions, API requests, Issues, Webhooks and other core services before the company began restoring affected systems later in the day.

The disruption began at 1:40 p.m. UTC (9:40 a.m. EDT), when GitHub said it was investigating reports of performance problems affecting some services.

Within minutes, the impact expanded across tools developers use to collaborate on code, run automated workflows and manage software projects.

GitHub Outage Hit Core Developer Tools

GitHub’s status page showed degraded availability for Pull Requests, Issues, Actions, API Requests, Webhooks, Pages and Git Operations, while GitHub Copilot also experienced degraded availability.

The disruption was particularly significant for repository downloads.

GitHub reported an approximately 20% error rate across web experiences and API traffic, while archive downloads and raw repository content were seeing error rates of about 50%.

SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM and Team Sync were also affected.

The impact meant developers could encounter errors while opening repositories or pull requests, using APIs, downloading code or relying on GitHub Actions for automated builds, testing and deployments.

GitHub Identified Problematic Component

GitHub initially said it was investigating the cause and deploying mitigations.

At 4:36 p.m. UTC, the company said it had identified the problematic component and taken corrective action.

“We identified the problematic component and have taken corrective actions.”

GitHub added that there were “strong signs of recovery,” although error rates remained slightly elevated as engineers worked toward full restoration.

By 4:59 p.m. UTC, GitHub said the degradation affecting API Requests, Actions, Git Operations, Issues, Pages, Pull Requests and Webhooks had been mitigated and that it was monitoring the systems for stability.

That means the latest status is more accurately described as recovery and monitoring rather than a continuing total outage.

GitHub had not publicly disclosed a root cause in its latest update.

The Importance of GitHub

GitHub is more than a website for storing code.

Developers and companies use its services for source-code collaboration, pull-request reviews, automated CI/CD workflows, APIs, package distribution and increasingly AI-assisted development through Copilot.

That made the incident broader than a simple website-access problem.

Failures involving Actions, APIs and Webhooks could interrupt automated software-development pipelines even when some other GitHub features remained available.

The outage also comes after several GitHub service disruptions earlier in August, including incidents involving Pull Requests and Issues, API requests, Copilot and GitHub Actions.

However, there is no evidence in GitHub’s latest update that those earlier incidents caused Monday’s outage, so the events should not be treated as one continuous failure.

For users who continued to see errors after the mitigation, GitHub’s status page remained the key source for service-by-service recovery information.