GitHub outage on 2026-08-12: Disruption with Login and Release Asset downloads

On August 12 and 13, 2026, some anonymous (logged-out) requests to github.com experienced HTTP 5xx errors when loading pages like the sign-in page, and when downloading release assets, due to an unusual traffic pattern that repeatedly overloaded a part of our infrastructure that serves these types of requests. There were three windows of impact: (1) August 12 from 16:34 to 18:34 UTC, with an average error rate of 16.16% that peaked at 28.6%; (2) August 12 from 19:00 to 22:56 UTC, with an average error rate of 16.55% that peaked at 24.18%; and (3) August 13 from 06:19 to 08:05 UTC, with an average error rate of 2.01% that peaked at 7.49%.<br />Requests from signed-in users were unaffected.<br /><br />We mitigated the incidents by applying traffic controls at our network edge that limited any requests matching the pattern identified previously, thereby preventing overload on our systems.<br /><br />Since these incidents occurred, we have tightened our monitoring systems to alert server-side errors that affect logged-out traffic. We are also working to further strengthen our edge protections and reduce the time to detect and mitigate similar incidents.