GitHub Was Down 4 Hours 16 Minutes on Monday With 20% API Error Rates and 50% Failure on Archive Downloads — Copilot Recovered Last
r/programming (corroborated by BleepingComputer, GeekWire, Engadget)·high signal
The incident opened at 13:40 UTC on 2026-08-17 and GitHub declared seven of eight affected services mitigated at 16:59 UTC; API Requests, Actions, Git Operations, Issues, Pages, Pull Requests and Webhooks returned to operational while Copilot stayed flagged as a major outage past that update. GitHub's status page reported ~20% error rates across web and API traffic and ~50% on archive and raw content downloads, with Downdetector logging 3,000+ reports. The r/programming thread hit 2,043 upvotes and 224 comments; root cause is still undisclosed, which matters for anyone whose CI, agent harness, or dependency install path assumes raw.githubusercontent.com is always up.