GitHub outage on 2026-08-20: Intermittent failures creating agent tasks

Between 13:57 UTC on August 20 and 00:37 UTC on August 21, 2026, some users of the Copilot Cloud Agent experienced delays of up to 60 to 90 minutes in seeing the status and results of their agent tasks. The agent tasks themselves continued to run and complete during this time; only the visibility of their status was delayed.<br /><br />The cause was a regional outage in a third-party cloud database service that Copilot uses to store agent task status. We failed over the affected database to a healthy region, added processing capacity to work through the backlog, and restored normal operation once the underlying service recovered. No task data was lost during the incident.<br /><br />To prevent repetition of similar incidents, we are removing the database configuration that made us vulnerable to this regional outage and improving our database failover procedures.