---
id: "INC-github-2dpbcq5j165n"
kind: "incident"
aliases: []
title: "GitHub: Actions Job Delays"
severity: "medium"
cvss: null
epss: null
exploited: false
status: "resolved"
category: "vendor"
products: [{"name": "GitHub", "fixed": [], "affected": "", "ecosystem": "vendor"}]
ecosystems: ["vendor"]
tags: ["ci", "git", "github", "github-actions", "github-hosted-runners", "incident", "security", "vendor"]
not_affected_if: ["no-actions-usage", "self-hosted-runners"]
published_at: "2026-10-01T14:47:48+00:00"
first_seen_at: "2026-10-23T19:12:22+00:00"
updated_at: "2026-10-23T20:20:15+00:00"
sources: [{"source": "statuspage", "url": "https://stspg.io/kdqxfjn5qg6q", "first_seen_at": "2026-10-23T19:12:22+00:00"}]
---

# GitHub: Actions Job Delays

GitHub Actions had a service incident on October 1, 2026 where about 0.196% of jobs failed to start and about 0.68% of workflow runs were delayed on GitHub-hosted runners. The sources describe an availability outage caused by a cloud provider routing change and rate limiting, with no sign of data exposure or attacker access.

_Summary, check and fix written by a model from the sources; labelled as such._

## Affected

- vendor:GitHub affected ? fixed ?

## How to check

Check your workflow run logs for jobs that stayed queued or failed to start between 14:15 and 17:56 UTC on October 1, 2026.

## Fix

No action is required; the incident is resolved and GitHub reports the provider has raised rate limits for their workloads.

## Timeline

- 2026-10-23T19:12:22+00:00 statuspage https://stspg.io/kdqxfjn5qg6q

## From the sources

On October 1, 2026, GitHub Actions experienced two periods of delayed and failed job starts on GitHub-hosted runners, beginning at approximately 14:15 UTC. Across the 14:15–17:56 UTC incident-response window, approximately 0.68% of workflow runs experienced start delays, and 0.196% of jobs failed to start. A routing change at our cloud provider concentrated API traffic on a single backend, causing an increase in rate-limit errors. Incorrect retry behavior in the provider’s inventory service added load to the affected APIs, compounding the rate limiting. This disrupted runner provisioning and reduced available capacity in affected regions. The resulting increase in demand in unaffected regions exposed a concurrency limit in our job-assignment system, delaying jobs even where runners were available. During the response, we increased job-assignment concurrency, scaled runner capacity, and worked with our cloud provider to reduce API load by excluding our runner subscriptions from its inventory service. By approximately 16:15 UTC, jobs were starting and executing as expected. We continued mitigation and monitoring until the incident was resolved at 17:56 UTC. Our cloud provider has since increased resource-management API rate limits for our workloads. To reduce the likelihood and impact of similar incidents, we are also adding more granular rate-limiting alerts and updating our job-assignment system to handle increased demand across fewer available regions.

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_Free to read at a human pace. An API with keys and an MCP server are in preparation; early access: hello@infrastack.ai_