GitHub outage had users weighing options, but finding few
Degraded availability on GitHub's network prevented some customers from using Copilot and deploying with GitHub Actions. Frustrated users found there's no easy alternative.
A major GitHub outage this week left some users unable to deploy code with GitHub Actions for hours, but switching to an alternative would be an immense undertaking, especially for companies with a large code footprint.
GitHub's incident page first reported an investigation just after 9:30 a.m. EST Aug. 17, then degraded performance for services including API requests, GitHub Actions and webhooks. Just after 10 a.m., the incident page reported high error rates -- around 20% -- for web experiences and API traffic, along with a 50% error rate for archive and raw repository content downloads. These high error rates then spread to SAML and OIDC authentication services. About an hour after the incident began, GitHub Copilot, pull requests, GitHub Issues and GitHub Actions were experiencing degraded availability.
These services include critical software deployment capabilities, including project management and CI/CD system triggers. GitHub Copilot has become a central component of agentic DevSecOps functions on the platform.
An incident post-mortem added at 5:15 p.m. EST Aug. 17 said the outage began with "network saturation on load balancers in Central US due to a new peak in traffic." All told, GitHub Copilot suffered a six-hour-and-44-minute outage, while GitHub API requests, Issues, pull requests and Actions were down for more than two hours, according to a GitHub status page.
That outage had me fuming and considering an alternative. All of our work ground to a halt
Steve KoelpinPrincipal AI observability engineer, Fortune 50 company
It's not the first time that a sharp uptick in AI-agent-generated traffic has caused reliability problems for GitHub this year. GitHub blog posts in April and again Aug. 12 called the severity, frequency and duration of incidents unacceptable and pledged improvements.
But the scope of the Aug.17 outage was broader for some users than previous incidents had been.
"That outage had me fuming and considering an alternative," said Steve Koelpin, principal AI observability engineer at a Fortune 50 company, of the Aug. 17 incident. "All of our work ground to a halt. We couldn't deploy, and our Actions were down."
Previous reliability incidents hadn't had such a broad impact, Koelpin said.
"For prior outages, service degraded, but the rest of the loop still worked, so you could route around it," he said. "Monday hit everything at once: pull requests, Actions, webhooks, SAML/OIDC, for roughly seven and a half hours. Git operations stayed up, so we could push [code], but couldn't review, merge or deploy. That's an inconvenience becoming a full stop."
Multiple customers other than Koelpin told TechTarget that errors and timeouts brought deployments to a full halt.
"We've been severely impacted. [It was] impossible to open or merge a PR for several hours yesterday," said Pascal Gandilhon, head of observability for Nexthink, Inc., makers of digital employee experience management software in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Costs of leaving GitHub still outweigh outage pain
Gandilhon said there hasn't been any talk of switching to a different platform at his company.
"We are deeply embedded with GitHub, but if this happens too often, for sure developers will start to complain," he said.
Koelpin said he began to investigate alternatives this week, but was stymied by the amount of time and effort it would take to move.
"The lock-in is Actions," he said. "Every workflow pulls Marketplace Actions that only exist on GitHub, and there's no equivalent catalog elsewhere. You rewrite all of it by hand, rebuild the runners, then redo branch protections, CODEOWNERS [files], SAML/SCIM, and every webhook feeding downstream. This is months of work, and none of it adds value that we don't have today."
Another user affected by the actions agreed that Actions makes it difficult to migrate away from GitHub.
"Migrating anywhere else means I have to figure out what to do with my build pipelines, and GitHub Actions has network effects," said Ricardo Torres, senior staff platform engineer at digital resiliency company Veeam Software. "Buildkite has a GitHub Actions runner, but again, I've got to still pay other migration costs. I've yet to see any of the new contenders really take on GitHub Actions."
Even if they don't migrate codebases and pipelines to a different platform, some customers affected by GitHub outages might consider setting up a secondary platform on Atlassian's Bitbucket or GitLab to continue operations in the event of another incident. But these alternatives don't amount to a full replacement for GitHub for now, according to Koelpin and Torres.
"Bitbucket isn't parity. You'd trade capability for uptime. GitLab is the only real alternative," but it can't match GitHub Actions Marketplace integrations, Koelpin said.
Meanwhile, newer competitors are clearly attempting to seize the moment of vulnerability for GitHub with new agentic DevSecOps services, including Cursor's Origin code hosting service, which launched Aug. 17. Cursor's agentic IDE saw a meteoric rise in popularity over the last two years, culminating in usage by 64% of Fortune 500 companies and more than 50,000 enterprises, according to the company's website. Cursor was bought by SpaceX for $60 billion in a deal that closed this month.
Cursor Origin remains in early beta, but it's rolling out to all paid plans, and "agent-native features ship soon," according to a Cursor blog post.
For now, the market for agentic DevSecOps remains GitHub's to lose, said Jason Andersen, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. But its lead won't last indefinitely.
"The issue is that while there are some alternatives like GitLab and even some new lifecycle management offerings from cloud providers, GitHub's lead is huge and these options are catching up," Andersen said. "My guess is that, over time, other agentic offerings will continue to get better and GitHub will need to compete more vigorously."
A GitHub spokesperson did not comment beyond sending a link to the incident post-mortem update.
Beth Pariseau, senior news writer for Informa TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism. Have a tip? Email her or connect on LinkedIn.
