Actions runs are experiencing failures to start

highGitHubActionsJul 13, 2026 13:32Duration: 22m
apiconfigurationcapacity
Configuration ErrorCapacity IssueAPI Issue

Summary

On July 13, 2026, between 13:11 and 13:53 UTC, some customers experienced failures starting and running GitHub Actions workflows, which also affected Copilot cloud agent sessions and GitHub Pages builds since they depend on Actions. During the peak of the incident, 30% of Actions jobs failed to start and 2% were delayed more than 5 minutes. <br /><br />The incident was triggered by a configuration change in an internal autoscaling component that contained outdated capacity threshold values. This

Impact

major

Timeline

Jul 13, 2026 13:32

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

via statuspage
+0m
Jul 13, 2026 13:32

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

via statuspage
+7m
Jul 13, 2026 13:39

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

via statuspage
+14m
Jul 13, 2026 13:53

[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 13, 2026 13:53

[resolved] On July 13, 2026, between 13:11 and 13:53 UTC, some customers experienced failures starting and running GitHub Actions workflows, which also affected Copilot cloud agent sessions and GitHub Pages builds since they depend on Actions. During the peak of the incident, 30% of Actions jobs failed to start and 2% were delayed more than 5 minutes. <br /><br />The incident was triggered by a configuration change in an internal autoscaling component that contained outdated capacity threshold values. This caused a critical Actions service to scale below its required baseline, reducing capacity for workflow processing. We identified the regression, rolled back the change, and restored service capacity. New workflow executions recovered by 13:39 UTC. Full recovery was reached by 13:53 UTC after the queued backlog was drained. <br /><br />To prevent recurrence, we have added deployment guardrails to validate that autoscaling inputs are current and to detect drift between planned and live scaling state before autoscaling changes are applied.

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, configuration, capacity have occurred 788 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: Configuration Error, Capacity Issue, API Issue. Consider implementing preventive measures specific to this failure category.