GitHub: Degraded availability for GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages and Webhooks

On October 19, 2026, between 15:24 and 16:52 UTC, GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages, and webhooks generated by Actions were degraded. Live updates on GitHub.com and code search were also degraded for part of this time. No data was lost. Impact - Workflow status updates, logs, and checks were delayed. - 5.13% of jobs on GitHub-hosted runners were delayed in starting, and 0.02% of workflow runs failed. - During the first 30 minutes, 8.47% of requests to the Actions jobs REST API returned errors. Pages deployments and webhooks generated by Actions runs were delayed. An internal Actions service that stores logs and run status lost connections to some of its cache servers in one cloud region and immediately retried them from every server at once. The resulting surge of new connections overloaded a shared network link between our data center and that region, which also disrupted other services that use the same link. We mitigated the incident by moving the Actions service off the affected cache servers and reducing connections from other services on the link. We then processed the delayed Actions work. We are continuing to investigate the cause of the initial connection timeouts. We were already in the process of rolling out a limit on how quickly this service can open new connections, but it was still in shadow mode (logging only, not enforcing) at the time of the incident. We have since fully enforced it and capped the service's concurrent connection attempts. We are extending these limits to other Actions services, adding backoff to retries, limiting how much shared network capacity a single service can use, and improving alerting so we can find the source of connection surges faster.