GitHub Availability Report: September 2026
GitHub reports progress on availability improvements, including moving more services to Azure and reducing shared database pressure.
Intelligence analysis by Qwen 2.5 (3B)
GitHub shares progress on their availability improvements, including moving services to Azure and reducing shared database pressure, while noting ongoing challenges and planned improvements.
GitHub is a place where people share their code. They had some problems with their servers, but they fixed them and are working on making their servers more reliable.
Analysis
Background on the August and September Outages
The GitHub team provided a detailed breakdown of the August and September outages, explaining the root causes and the measures taken to prevent similar incidents in the future. The August 6 actions outage, August 17 github.com outage, September failover disruption, and controlled capacity pause were all reminders that measured improvements matter only when they reduce customer risk under real conditions.
Improvements Made
The GitHub team has made several improvements to reduce shared database pressure, added overload controls, created headroom for GitHub Actions, expanded failure containment for pull requests, and moved more production workloads to Azure. These improvements have helped reduce error rates across affected services and improve overall availability.
Challenges and Future Plans
Despite these improvements, the GitHub team still faces challenges, including uneven capacity across availability zones and ongoing capacity work to unlock all available capacity by the end of October. They have paused deployments and traffic increases to address these issues and are implementing additional safeguards to improve database resilience and service availability.
Key points
- GitHub made improvements to reduce shared database pressure and improve availability.
- They are moving more production workloads to Azure to improve reliability.
- They are implementing additional safeguards to improve database resilience and service availability.
- They are working on unlocking all available capacity by the end of October.
- They are pausing deployments and traffic increases to address uneven capacity across availability zones.
With continued improvements and additional safeguards, GitHub aims to achieve full availability and capacity by the end of October.
If the ongoing capacity work does not progress as planned, GitHub may face challenges in achieving full availability and capacity by the end of October.
