Incident with GraphQL API Requests

lowGitHubAPIAug 11, 2026 14:50Duration: 5h 16m
apicapacityrouting
Network / RoutingCapacity IssueAPI Issue

Summary

On August 11, 2026, between 14:00 UTC and 16:00 UTC the GraphQL API service was degraded and customers in saw higher than normal timeouts. On average, the timeout rate was 0.06% and peaked at 0.14% of requests routing to the service. <br /><br />This was due to increased utilization at one of our sites which caused resource contention across our dependencies, leading to an increase in timeouts for GraphQL requests. We mitigated the incident by increasing capacity to alleviate the capacity bottl

Impact

minor

Timeline

Aug 11, 2026 14:50

[investigating] We are investigating reports of degraded performance for API Requests

via statuspage
+38m
Aug 11, 2026 15:28

[investigating] We are investigating reports of a small increase in error rates affecting GraphQL API requests. We are working on increasing capacity and continue to investigate the increased errors. We will provide another update when we have more information

via statuspage
+1h 21m
Aug 11, 2026 16:49

[investigating] We have returned to a healthy baseline on GraphQL API requests. We will continue to work on investigations into the errors seen during this incident.

via statuspage
+0m
Aug 11, 2026 16:49

[monitoring] The degradation affecting API Requests has been mitigated. We are monitoring to ensure stability.

via statuspage
+3h 17m
Aug 11, 2026 20:06

[monitoring] We have identified and mitigated increased error rates affecting GraphQL API requests. A fix to increase service capacity has been deployed and error rates have returned to normal levels. We are resolving this incident.

via statuspage
+0m
Aug 11, 2026 20:06

[resolved] This incident has been resolved. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we addressed this issue. A detailed root cause analysis will be shared as soon as it is available.

via statuspage
+0m
Aug 11, 2026 20:06

[resolved] On August 11, 2026, between 14:00 UTC and 16:00 UTC the GraphQL API service was degraded and customers in saw higher than normal timeouts. On average, the timeout rate was 0.06% and peaked at 0.14% of requests routing to the service. <br /><br />This was due to increased utilization at one of our sites which caused resource contention across our dependencies, leading to an increase in timeouts for GraphQL requests. We mitigated the incident by increasing capacity to alleviate the capacity bottleneck. <br /><br />We are working to improve our monitoring so that we can proactively reduce the impact of high consumption requests in addition to scaling up; Additionally, we will improve our time to detection and mitigation of issues like this one in the future.

via statuspage

Lessons Learned

GitHub has experienced 148 incidents in the past year. This frequency suggests systemic reliability challenges that may warrant additional monitoring.

📊Incidents related to api, capacity, routing have occurred 1037 times across all providers in the past year. This is one of the most common failure categories in cloud infrastructure.

💡This incident is categorized as: Network / Routing, Capacity Issue, API Issue. Consider implementing preventive measures specific to this failure category.