GitHub, one of the world most widely used platforms for software development, faced a major outage on August 17, affecting developers across several countries, including India. The disruption caused problems with GitHub website, API, Pull Requests, Issues, Webhooks and GitHub Actions. GitHub also reported issues affecting its AI coding tool, Copilot.
The biggest concern was the high failure rate for downloads. Around 50 percent of archive and Raw repository content downloads were failing, making it difficult for developers to access or download code from repositories. Web and API traffic also saw error rates of around 20 percent. The outage started at around 13:40 UTC on August 17. GitHub confirmed that it was investigating performance problems affecting its services. The company worked to restore the affected systems while developers reported difficulties with their normal coding and deployment work.
Some GitHub services, including Git Operations, Packages and Code spaces, remained operational during the disruption. However, the outage still created major problems for developers and teams that depend on GitHub for storing code, collaboration and software development. As of the latest reports, GitHub had not publicly confirmed the root cause of the outage. The incident highlights how a disruption at a major developer platform can quickly affect software projects and online services around the world.
