January service disruptions on GitHub
GitHub recorded two incidents in January that caused degraded performance across parts of its platform. The first affected GitHub Copilot, while the second had a wider impact across core repository and collaboration features.
Copilot outage traced to configuration error
On January 13, between 09:25 and 10:11 UTC, GitHub Copilot experienced a service outage with error rates averaging 18% and peaking at 100%. The disruption affected chat features in Copilot Chat, VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, and other dependent products.
The root cause was a configuration error introduced during a model update. Rolling back the change provided initial mitigation, but full recovery extended until 10:46 UTC because upstream provider Open AI was experiencing degraded availability for the GPT‑4.1 model.
GitHub states it has completed a detailed root-cause review and is implementing stronger monitors, improved test environments, and tighter configuration safeguards to prevent recurrence and speed up detection and mitigation of future issues.
Wide-reaching impact from data store upgrade
On January 15, from 16:40 to 18:20 UTC, GitHub observed increased latency and timeouts across issues, pull requests, notifications, actions, repositories, API, account login, and the internal service Alive, which powers live updates on the platform. An average 1.8% of combined web and API requests failed, with a brief peak of 10% early in the incident. Unauthenticated users were impacted most, though authenticated users were also affected.
The cause was an infrastructure update to several data stores. Upgrading this infrastructure to a new major version led to unexpected resource contention, which produced slow queries and increased timeouts in dependent services. GitHub mitigated the issue by rolling back to the previous stable version.
The company says it is working to improve its validation process for these types of upgrades so it can catch issues that only surface under high load before full release, while also aiming to improve detection time and reduce mitigation times.
February incidents to be reported separately
Incidents that occurred on February 9, 2026, will be covered in next month's February Availability Report. For immediate details, GitHub points to the incident report on the GitHub Status site.
Real-time status updates and post-incident recaps are available via the status page, and ongoing engineering work is discussed in the engineering section of the GitHub Blog.
