GitHub Actions Outage on Aug 26 Delayed Workflows and Blocked PR Merges

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GitHub experienced a service incident on August 26, 2026, between approximately 21:55 UTC and 23:58 UTC, affecting Actions workflows triggered by pull request events. At peak disruption, up to 25% of workflow runs faced delayed starts exceeding five minutes, while 4% failed to trigger at all. The root cause was traced to background jobs timing out while accessing a single git data partition, creating a backlog that cascaded into broader pull request processing failures. GitHub engineers resolved the issue by reducing workload, rerouting traffic away from affected infrastructure, and restoring the impacted service component. The incident highlighted the operational risks CI/CD dependencies pose to release schedules and prompted GitHub to commit to improved resource saturation detection and stronger backpressure mechanisms.

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