In January, GitHub experienced two incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.
Incident 1: January 13, 09:38 UTC (46 minutes)
From 09:25 to 10:11 UTC, GitHub Copilot experienced a service outage with error rates averaging 18% and peaking at 100%. This impacted chat features across Copilot Chat, VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, and other dependent products.
Root Cause: A configuration error introduced during a model update.
Remediation: The incident was initially mitigated by rolling back the change. A secondary recovery phase extended until 10:46 UTC due to upstream provider OpenAI experiencing degraded availability for the GPT-4.1 model. GitHub has completed a detailed root-cause review and is implementing stronger monitors, improved test environments, and tighter configuration safeguards to prevent recurrence and accelerate detection and mitigation of future issues.
Incident 2: January 15, 16:56 UTC (1 hour 40 minutes)
Between 16:40 UTC and 18:20 UTC, GitHub observed increased latency and timeouts across issues, pull requests, notifications, actions, repositories, the API, account login, and Alive, an internal service that powers live updates on GitHub. An average of 1.8% of combined web and API requests saw failure, peaking briefly at 10% early on. The majority of impact was observed for unauthenticated users, but authenticated users were impacted as well.
Root Cause: An infrastructure update to some of GitHub’s data stores. Upgrading this infrastructure to a new major version resulted in unexpected resource contention, leading to distributed impact in the form of slow queries and increased timeouts across services that depend on these datasets.
Remediation: GitHub mitigated the incident by rolling back to the previous stable version. The company is working to improve its validation process for these types of upgrades to catch issues that only occur under high load before full release, improve detection time, and reduce mitigation times in the future.
Note: incidents that occurred on February 9, 2026, were covered in the following month’s February Availability Report rather than this one.