GitHub to stop queuing jobs to outdated self-hosted runners from September 25, 2026
GitHub will permanently stop routing jobs to self-hosted Actions runners running outdated versions starting September 25, 2026, with scheduled brownouts beginning September 7. During brownouts, affected runners silently fail — jobs remain stuck in a queued state with no workflow-level error, making the issue easy to miss. GitHub provides an API endpoint to check the end-of-life date for any runner version, and the actual deprecation window is roughly 63–71 days after release, longer than the documented 30-day rule. Users of Actions Runner Controller are particularly at risk since auto-update is disabled by default, meaning pinned image tags can become a hidden source of outages. A developer has released an open-source GitHub CLI extension, gh-runner-eol, that audits both live runners and pinned version references in source files such as Dockerfiles and Helm values, with optional SARIF output for CI integration.
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