I've been building a tool that watches GitHub CI pipelines and surfaces failures every morning. While building it I started paying closer attention to GitHub's own reliability track record.
The numbers are worse than I expected.
Between May 2025 and April 2026, GitHub experienced 257 incidents including 48 major outages. GitHub Actions alone suffered 57 outages in that period. GitHub's CTO attributed the root cause to explosive growth from agentic AI workflows demanding 30 times the platform's designed capacity.
That's roughly five incidents a week, every week, for a year.
The problem this creates for developers
When your CI pipeline fails, you now have two possible explanations. Your code broke something, or GitHub is having an incident. Without visibility into both, you're flying blind.
On May 15, 2026, GitHub Actions experienced a degradation where at peak impact 42% of Actions runs failed. Any developer who woke up that morning and saw CI failures across their repos would reasonably start debugging their own code, before eventually realising it was a platform issue, not their problem.
That's hours of wasted debugging time across thousands of developers simultaneously.
The situation has gotten bad enough that Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp, announced his Ghostty terminal emulator project, which has over 52,000 GitHub stars, would be leaving the platform, writing that GitHub "is no longer a place for serious work."
What you can actually do about it
You probably can't move off GitHub today. Most teams can't. But you can change how you relate to the noise it generates.
A few things that help:
- Check the GitHub status page before debugging CI failures (githubstatus.com). It sounds obvious but most developers don't do it automatically.
- Group your CI failures before investigating. Three failures on the same repo in an hour are probably one problem, not three. And if that problem started at the same time GitHub had a known incident, that's your answer.
- Separate platform failures from code failures in how you track them. They require different responses and different people. I built Dailix to solve the grouping and prioritisation problem for myself - one email every morning that tells me what's actually broken versus what's noise. It doesn't solve the GitHub reliability problem but it does mean I spend less time confused about what's happening in my repos.
- GitHub's CTO has acknowledged the scaling challenges. The frequency of major outages has been increasing since December 2025. Until the platform stabilises, having better visibility into your own CI activity is the most practical thing you can do.
Top comments (0)