Two January incidents degraded Git downloads and container registries
GitHub recorded two separate incidents in January, both affecting different parts of the platform: one hit GitHub Packages and Pages, while the other impacted git users downloading source archives.
Container registry and Pages degraded after backend change
On January 30 at 21:48 UTC, monitors picked up degraded performance for GitHub Packages and GitHub Pages. Most requests to the container registry failed, and a subset of Pages builds were also affected. The root cause was traced to a backend modification, which was reverted to restore normal service. The incident lasted 35 minutes.
Because the event is recent, the full contributing factors are still under investigation. GitHub says it will provide a more detailed breakdown in next month's availability report.
Source archive checksums changed after git binary upgrade
Earlier that same day at 18:35 UTC, a separate issue began that lasted seven hours. GitHub had upgraded its production git binary to a recent upstream version, which included a switch to an internal gzip implementation used when generating archives. That change subtly altered the contents of the “Download Source” links served by GitHub, causing checksum mismatches for users. The underlying content itself was not modified.
Once the impact on many communities became clear, GitHub rolled back the compression change to restore the previous behavior. As with the earlier incident, the investigation is ongoing and a more thorough update is expected in the next monthly report.
Real-time status updates remain available on the GitHub status page, and ongoing engineering work is covered on the GitHub Engineering Blog.
