GitHub availability report: August 2026

GitHub’s August availability report is worth reading for the failure modes alone. There were five incidents, the longest nearly 11 hours. Causes: too little capacity headroom during deploys, database saturation, an upstream provider, and service-mesh sidecars that didn’t scale with load. Actions, APIs, PRs, auth and Copilot were all affected. Sidecars are part of your capacity plan too.