Dealing with an incident on prod is extra difficult when your pipelines are not running.

It's not too hard to switch over from GitHub actions to other runners. For example, I wrote up the steps needed in order to use Hugging Face Jobs instead, which also enables GPU runners and other flavors. I use this for several of the repos I manage (such as Trackio):

https://huggingface.co/blog/github-ci-hf-jobs

It's 9:30pm pacific time - my build is still completely borked ... and we're self hosting runners.

I think we need to ask for some money back, this is BONKERS.

Any more of this, and we'll go full Gitlab, like we should have years ago!

Incident number 6 for the month of August, notably on August 6th. This pattern does not bode well.

This whole mess brought to like just now little moat there is left in the AI world.

Like, everyone talks about how you can just prompt a new CRM instead of paying for Salesforce.

But in this case, I raced with Fable and Sol and had time to build a full featured, fully functional CI/CD workflow system that has most of the features of GitHub actions (not the ecosystem obviously) and costs less than the GitHub runners per minute, while being able to scale to millions of workflows... And I had it working end to end before the outage was resolved and was already running my apps deploys through it.

It would take a little longer to do in a company with red tape and more investments in the GitHub ecosystem, and of course it only replaced actions. But it works.

There is no moat.

Soon we can start posting "GitHub {x} is up!" instead, that's becoming more news-worthy lol. I know they like to blame AI/scaling, but really they are owned by one of the main hyperscalers, so I find that excuse kind of weak..

On other occasions, I'd take this as a time to have a walk because I'm blocked. Unfortunately, I need to get some stuff out for a customer quickly. Can't do anything about that though. GitHub is the only product in it's size class that I use that has this kind of incredibly poor uptime.

I'd love to know what the most common root causes for these outages are.

The speed at which GitHub is tanking their reputation is fascinating

I think this is because all frontier AI providers integrate with GitHub as a default git forge through their GitHub apps platform and their free tier is too generous. They should either charge some of these huge partners access to GitHub apps or partition the free tier off and have a different SLA.

If the frontier AI used GitLab as a default I'm sure they'd be the ones suffering now.

Nothing like the old "everything is normal" to only be corrected 8 minutes later it is actually still down and then 2 hours later they are still working on it.

Aug 06, 2026 - 16:27 UTC - Update - Pages is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.

Aug 06, 2026 - 16:19 UTC - Update - Pages is operating normally.