Delays starting Actions runs

criticalGitHubActionsJul 9, 2026 04:34Duration: 9h 18m
apiauthenticationcapacity
Capacity IssueAuthentication IssueAPI Issue

Summary

On July 9, 2026, between 03:29 UTC and 13:39 UTC, GitHub Actions experienced delayed and failed job starts on GitHub-hosted runners. The incident was caused by an unhealthy state in a backend data service responsible for provisioning hosted runners, preventing runner acquisition for a subset of workloads. During most of the incident, approximately 8% of workflow runs on hosted runners were delayed by more than 5 minutes, while roughly 2% failed to start.<br /><br />At 13:39 UTC, we restored the

Impact

critical

Timeline

Jul 9, 2026 04:34

[investigating] We are investigating reports of degraded performance for Actions

via statuspage
+17m
Jul 9, 2026 04:51

[investigating] Approximately 5% of GitHub Actions runs on GitHub-hosted runners are experiencing run start delays exceeding 5 minutes. A small portion of these runs may fail after extended delays. We have identified the cause and are working on a mitigation.

via statuspage
+1h 10m
Jul 9, 2026 06:01

[investigating] We are continuing to work on a mitigation.

via statuspage
+4h 5m
Jul 9, 2026 10:07

[investigating] Actions is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.

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+8m
Jul 9, 2026 10:15

[investigating] Approximately 30% of GitHub Actions runs on GitHub-hosted runners are experiencing run start delays exceeding 5 minutes. A smaller percentage of those are exhausting retries and failing to start.

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+1h 47m
Jul 9, 2026 12:01

[investigating] Approximately 30% of GitHub Actions runs on GitHub-hosted runners are experiencing run start delays exceeding 5 minutes. A smaller percentage of those are exhausting retries and failing to start.<br />This has caused some customers to exceed their hosted compute concurrency and experience increased impact.<br /><br />We are continuing to working on infrastructure mitigations. <br /><br />Next update in one hour.

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+35m
Jul 9, 2026 12:36

[investigating] Pages is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.

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+10m
Jul 9, 2026 12:46

[investigating] Actions is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.

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+8m
Jul 9, 2026 12:54

[investigating] We're seeing Actions and Pages recovery. <br /><br />For a period of approximate 20 minutes ~96% of GitHub Actions runs on GitHub-hosted runners were failing to start, but has now recovered and we are seeing jobs processing.<br /><br />GitHub pages builds were also failing during that period, but Pages are still accessible.<br /><br />We are continuing to monitor for full recovery.

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+22m
Jul 9, 2026 13:16

[investigating] Actions is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.

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+0m
Jul 9, 2026 13:17

[investigating] We are continuing to monitor slow recovery in Actions and Pages builds as the system works through the high volume of backlog.<br /><br />Customers may see a small rate of  API and job failures as the system is recovering.<br /><br />Copilot Cloud Agent and Copilot Code Review also failed to start for approximately 30 minutes during this incident, and we are monitoring recovery.<br /><br />Pages were accessible throughout the incident.

via statuspage
+23m
Jul 9, 2026 13:39

[monitoring] The degradation affecting Actions and Pages has been mitigated. We are monitoring to ensure stability.

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+2m
Jul 9, 2026 13:41

[monitoring] Actions, Pages builds, Copilot Cloud Agent, and Copilot Code review have all recovered and are mitigated.<br /><br />We are continuing to monitor to ensure full recovery, and investigating the health of the affected infrastructure.

via statuspage
+11m
Jul 9, 2026 13:52

[resolved] This incident has been resolved. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we addressed this issue. A detailed root cause analysis will be shared as soon as it is available.

via statuspage
+0m
Jul 9, 2026 13:52

[resolved] On July 9, 2026, between 03:29 UTC and 13:39 UTC, GitHub Actions experienced delayed and failed job starts on GitHub-hosted runners. The incident was caused by an unhealthy state in a backend data service responsible for provisioning hosted runners, preventing runner acquisition for a subset of workloads. During most of the incident, approximately 8% of hosted-runner jobs experienced start delays exceeding 5 minutes, while roughly 2% failed to start.<br /><br />At 13:39 UTC, we restored the health of the backend data replication system, allowing provisioning to recover and the accumulated workflow backlog to drain. Service performance then returned to expected levels. We are improving provisioning-service resiliency, workload distribution, and capacity balancing to reduce the likelihood and impact of similar incidents.

via statuspage
+0m
Jul 9, 2026 13:52

[resolved] On July 9, 2026, between 03:29 UTC and 13:39 UTC, GitHub Actions experienced delayed and failed job starts on GitHub-hosted runners. The incident was caused by an unhealthy state in a backend data service responsible for provisioning hosted runners, preventing runner acquisition for a subset of workloads. During most of the incident, approximately 8% of workflow runs on hosted runners were delayed by more than 5 minutes, while roughly 2% failed to start.<br /><br />At 13:39 UTC, we restored the health of the backend data replication system, allowing provisioning to recover and the accumulated workflow backlog to drain. Service performance then returned to expected levels. We are improving provisioning-service resiliency, workload distribution, and capacity balancing to reduce the likelihood and impact of similar incidents.

via statuspage

Lessons Learned

GitHub has experienced 114 incidents in the past year. This frequency suggests systemic reliability challenges that may warrant additional monitoring.

📊Incidents related to api, authentication, capacity have occurred 848 times across all providers in the past year. This is one of the most common failure categories in cloud infrastructure.

💡This incident is categorized as: Capacity Issue, Authentication Issue, API Issue. Consider implementing preventive measures specific to this failure category.