GitHub outage, 17 August 2026

GitHub Central US load balancer capacity outage (17 August 2026).

What happened. A new traffic peak pushed one data center’s load balancers past their limits, and a service-mesh sidecar hit its concurrency limit and did not scale. The capacity pressure spread into authentication failures and broad service errors, and a Copilot client retry loop slowed recovery.

What changes. GitHub is applying consistent retry limits, retry budgets and variable timeouts across services, correcting sidecar autoscaling, and reviewing capacity alerts.

Questions

What caused the GitHub outage in August 2026?

A new traffic peak pushed one data center’s load balancers past their limits, and a service-mesh sidecar hit its concurrency limit and did not scale.

Which services were affected?

Issues, pull requests, REST and GraphQL APIs, Actions, Copilot, sign-in/authentication, webhooks.

Read how shared dependencies spread a failure in why one cloud outage can break unrelated apps, or browse the outage archive.