GitHub is the world's largest source code hosting platform, used by over 100 million developers for version control, collaboration, and CI/CD pipelines via GitHub Actions. Acquired by Microsoft in 2018, GitHub hosts more than 420 million repositories and serves as the backbone of open-source software development. Teams of all sizes rely on GitHub for pull request reviews, issue tracking, project boards, and automated workflows that power modern software delivery.
GitHub outages typically stem from database infrastructure issues, GitHub Actions compute capacity exhaustion, or Git backend storage problems. The most common user-reported issues involve repository cloning failures, Actions workflow queuing delays, and the web UI returning 500 errors. GitHub's microservices architecture means individual components like Actions, Pages, API, and Copilot can fail independently while other services remain operational.
When GitHub goes down, CI/CD pipelines break globally, deployments halt, and development teams lose access to source code. Companies relying on GitHub Actions for automated testing and deployment are especially affected. GitHub Pages outages take down thousands of developer documentation sites and personal blogs. Copilot disruptions impact developer productivity across millions of IDE installations worldwide.
GitHub outages are usually caused by database infrastructure issues, GitHub Actions compute overload, or Git backend storage failures. Check GitHub's official status page at githubstatus.com for real-time incident updates and root cause analysis from the GitHub engineering team.
GitHub experiences minor incidents several times per month, typically affecting individual components like Actions or Pages rather than the entire platform. Major outages affecting all services are rare, occurring roughly 2-4 times per year, and usually resolve within 1-3 hours.
First, check if the issue is global or just affecting you by visiting githubstatus.com. If GitHub Actions is down, consider caching dependencies locally. If Git operations fail, your local repository still works — you just can't push or pull until service resumes. Set up monitoring alerts so you know the moment GitHub recovers.
GitHub outages don't directly affect already-deployed applications. However, if you use GitHub Actions for CI/CD, new deployments will be blocked. GitHub Pages sites may go down during Pages-specific outages. Applications fetching content from GitHub's raw API at runtime will also be affected.
You can monitor GitHub with PinusX Uptime Monitor for free — get Slack and email alerts within 60 seconds of any outage. You can also subscribe to githubstatus.com for official updates, or follow @githubstatus on Twitter for real-time incident communication.
Monitor GitHub uptime with PinusX. Get instant alerts when services go down.