Is GitHub Down? How to Check GitHub Status in 2026

GitHub is the world's largest code hosting platform — over 100 million developers and 420 million repositories depend on it daily. When GitHub goes down, the blast radius is massive: CI/CD pipelines fail, production deployments halt, code reviews stop, and engineering teams across the world grind to a standstill.

In early 2026 alone, GitHub has experienced multiple high-profile incidents: Actions degradation on March 12, Codespaces outages on March 13 and March 16, and intermittent Git LFS failures. Knowing how to diagnose a GitHub outage — and which specific service is affected — is a critical SRE skill.

This guide shows you how to quickly confirm whether GitHub is down, identify the affected component, and protect your team's productivity during an outage.

The Fastest Way to Check If GitHub Is Down

Start with official and crowdsourced sources:

• githubstatus.com — GitHub's official real-time status page. Lists active incidents, maintenance windows, and component status across all services.
• Downdetector — GitHub — crowdsourced outage reports. Spikes often appear 5–15 minutes before GitHub posts an official incident.
• Twitter/X: @githubstatus — GitHub's official status bot. Posts updates in real time during incidents.

GitHub maintains excellent incident transparency. If the status page shows green but you're experiencing issues, check the incident history — some degradations are confirmed after a brief delay as the team validates scope.

GitHub Services: Which One Is Down?

GitHub is not a single product. An Actions outage doesn't mean git push is broken, and a Codespaces degradation won't affect the GitHub API. Identify the affected component before escalating:

Git Operations (push/pull/clone) Down

Core git operations failing is the most disruptive category — it blocks everyone.

• Check githubstatus.com → "Git Operations" component
• Quick test: git push origin main — look for error messages referencing GitHub's servers
• Error remote: Repository not found is usually an auth/permissions issue, not an outage
• Error Connection reset by peer or SSL_read: Connection reset by peer during a known incident typically means GitHub edge or load balancer issues
• Test with HTTPS and SSH separately — outages sometimes only affect one transport

GitHub Actions Down

Actions is the most incident-prone GitHub service. Workflows queued, stuck, or failing unexpectedly often mean Actions is degraded.

• Check githubstatus.com → "Actions" component
• Symptoms: jobs queued indefinitely, workflows start but fail at runner setup, self-hosted runners connecting but GitHub-hosted runners timing out
• Actions degradations are often regional — check if your jobs run in a specific region (runs-on: ubuntu-latest-large routes differently than ubuntu-latest)
• Workaround during Actions outages: trigger workflows manually via the GitHub API once service recovers, or push a temporary no-op commit to re-queue
• Recent: Actions experienced degradation on March 12–13, 2026 affecting workflow queuing and runner availability

GitHub Pages Down

Pages hosts static sites directly from repositories. A Pages outage affects documentation, project sites, and any production websites built on the platform.

• Check githubstatus.com → "Pages" component
• Symptoms: github.io sites returning 502 or 503; custom domain Pages sites returning Cloudflare or Fastly errors
• Pages deployments (the GitHub Actions Pages deploy workflow) and serving are tracked separately — a deploy failure doesn't mean existing sites are down
• Test: curl -I https://your-username.github.io — check for GitHub server headers and HTTP status code

GitHub Codespaces Down

Codespaces provides cloud development environments. Outages affect developers who work primarily in browser-based or desktop Codespaces.

• Check githubstatus.com → "Codespaces" component
• Symptoms: Codespaces failing to start, pre-build failures, browser-based IDE connection timeouts, existing Codespaces becoming unreachable
• Codespaces runs on Azure infrastructure — GitHub infrastructure incidents sometimes correlate with Azure regional issues
• Workaround: switch to local development with git clone + local VS Code during Codespaces outages
• Recent: Codespaces experienced outages on March 13 and March 16, 2026

GitHub API Down

The GitHub REST and GraphQL APIs power thousands of integrations, CI/CD tools, and internal dashboards. API degradation is often invisible until pipelines start failing.

• Check githubstatus.com → "API Requests" component
• Symptoms: GitHub integrations (Slack notifications, deploy hooks, GitHub Apps) failing silently; gh CLI commands hanging; Webhooks not delivered
• Test: curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/torvalds/linux | head -3 — a 200 response confirms the API is up
• Rate limit errors (403 rate limit exceeded) are not an outage — they're throttling
• Webhook delivery failures are tracked separately at githubstatus.com → "Webhooks"

GitHub Packages Down

GitHub Packages hosts npm, Maven, NuGet, Docker, and RubyGems packages. Package registry outages affect build pipelines that pull dependencies from GitHub.

• Check githubstatus.com → "Packages" component
• Symptoms: npm install or docker pull ghcr.io/...) failures in CI; 503 or connection timeout from GitHub's package endpoints
• GitHub Container Registry (ghcr.io) is tracked under Packages — check specifically if Docker pulls are failing
• Fallback: mirror critical packages to an internal registry (JFrog Artifactory, Nexus, or AWS CodeArtifact) to avoid build failures during GitHub Package outages

GitHub's Historical Uptime

GitHub maintains strong uptime — typically 99.9%+ for core git operations — but incidents are more frequent than most platform teams expect. The first quarter of 2026 has seen multiple incidents:

Date	Service	Duration	Impact
March 16, 2026	Codespaces	~3 hours	Codespaces creation and connection failures
March 12–13, 2026	Actions, Codespaces	~5 hours	CI/CD queuing delays, Codespaces degradation
Various, Q1 2026	Git LFS	Intermittent	Large file uploads and downloads failing

GitHub publishes a full incident history at githubstatus.com/history.

Is It GitHub or Is It You?

Before assuming GitHub is down, rule out local causes:

• Authentication errors (remote: Repository not found, 403 Forbidden) → usually expired tokens, SSH key rotation, or permission changes — not an outage
• DNS resolution failures → try nslookup github.com — if DNS fails, the issue is your local network or ISP
• Slow pushes to large repos → bandwidth or local disk I/O, not GitHub
• GitHub App webhooks not firing → check your app's webhook delivery log at github.com/settings/apps/your-app/advanced
• Dependency on GitHub Actions marketplace → some Actions are third-party; failures may be in the action itself, not GitHub infrastructure

Protecting Your Team During GitHub Outages

The best time to prepare for a GitHub outage is before it happens:

Immediate response during an outage

• Confirm first: check githubstatus.com and Downdetector before escalating internally — avoid wasting engineer time on a confirmed platform issue
• Switch CI/CD provider temporarily: if Actions is down but your repo is accessible, trigger builds via GitLab CI, CircleCI, or self-hosted runners
• Use local mirrors: developers can continue working on local clones; push when service recovers
• Postpone deployments: don't push to production while CI is degraded — the risk of skipping verification outweighs the delay

Long-term resilience

• Mirror critical repos to GitLab or Bitbucket for failover — especially if your deployment pipeline depends on git operations
• Cache package dependencies in an internal registry so builds don't fail when GitHub Packages is degraded
• Self-hosted Actions runners: add self-hosted runners as fallback when GitHub-hosted runners are unavailable (requires your own infrastructure)
• Status page monitoring: set up automated monitoring on githubstatus.com so your team gets alerted before developers notice degradation

Set Up Automated GitHub Outage Alerts

Don't rely on manually checking the status page during an incident. Set up automated monitoring:

1. Subscribe to githubstatus.com: GitHub's status page offers email, SMS, Atom feed, and webhook subscriptions — click "Subscribe to Updates" and choose your channel
2. Monitor the GitHub API directly: set up a synthetic monitor that calls https://api.github.com/ every minute — when it returns non-200, you know the API is degraded before most people check Twitter
3. Monitor your critical repos: test a git clone or API call against your most important repos as a real-world smoke test

Ezmon monitors GitHub's services (API, Actions, Pages, Packages, Codespaces) from multiple global locations and sends alerts via Slack, email, or PagerDuty when any component degrades. You'll know before your Slack starts filling up with "is GitHub down?" messages.

→ Set up GitHub monitoring on Ezmon — free tier available, no credit card required.

GitHub Status Monitoring for Teams

For engineering teams with GitHub dependencies, consider a layered monitoring approach:

• Tier 1 — GitHub's own status page: subscribe for incident notifications
• Tier 2 — External synthetic monitoring: independently verify GitHub API and git operation availability every 1–5 minutes
• Tier 3 — Internal pipeline health: monitor your own CI/CD pipeline success rates — a sudden drop in passing builds is often the first signal of a GitHub Actions degradation

The combination of these three layers gives you fast, reliable detection regardless of GitHub's own incident reporting speed.

Summary

Service	Status Page Section	Quick Test
Git Push/Pull/Clone	Git Operations	git push origin main
GitHub Actions	Actions	Check workflow queue in your repo
GitHub Pages	Pages	curl -I https://username.github.io
GitHub Codespaces	Codespaces	Try launching a new Codespace
GitHub API	API Requests	curl https://api.github.com/
GitHub Packages / ghcr.io	Packages	docker pull ghcr.io/owner/image:tag
Webhooks	Webhooks	Check app webhook delivery log