CircleCI's 59% CI Throughput Stat Misrepresents Most Engineering Teams

CircleCI published a report in February 2026 based on over 28 million workflows run in September 2025, claiming a 59% year-over-year rise in daily workflow runs — but that figure is a skewed mean driven by a small group of extreme users. For the median team, feature-branch throughput grew just 15%, while main-branch throughput actually declined 7%, meaning more work was created but fewer merges occurred. Fewer than one in twenty teams managed to scale both code creation and delivery simultaneously, and only the top 5% saw substantial gains in main-branch throughput. Main-branch build success rates dropped to 70.8%, the lowest in five years, well below CircleCI's own recommended benchmark of 90%, with median recovery time rising to 72 minutes. Critics note the report excels at counting workflows but offers little insight into why failure rates are climbing or whether high-throughput pipelines — some averaging just six seconds — reflect meaningful development work at all.