GitHub: Incident with Webhooks

Between 14:24 and 14:53 UTC on 13 August 2026, a routine background job to delete an organization overwhelmed a key shared database, causing multiple GitHub services to briefly return elevated errors and slower responses. Most affected was the webhook management API, with smaller impact to Git operations, pull requests, issues, packages, sign-in, and Copilot. Impact cleared on its own at about 14:53 UTC once the job finished; we resolved the incident at 15:36 UTC. Affected users may have experienced a brief increase in errors and slower responses, primarily when creating, listing, or updating webhooks, with smaller impacts to pull requests, issues, packages, and Git operations. Failures peaked at about 1% for several minutes around 14:37 UTC. To prevent future incidents, we've already shipped an update that turns on the safer deletion path for organizations, along with caps on deletion holds on databases. Building on these changes, we're auditing all bulk deletion and cleanup jobs that write to shared databases to prevent similar issues in future.