Delayed visibility of newly added issues on project boards

lowGitHubMar 2, 2026 23:10Duration: 6h 44m
databasecapacity
Database OverloadCapacity Issue

Summary

Between March 2, 21:42 UTC and March 3, 05:54 UTC project board updates, including adding new issues, PRs, and draft items to boards, were delayed from 30 minutes to over 2 hours, as a large backlog of messages accumulated in the Projects data denormalization pipeline.<br /><br />The incident was caused by an anomalously large event that required longer processing time than expected. Processing this message exceeded the Kafka consumer heartbeat timeout, triggering repeated consumer group rebalan

Impact

minor

Timeline

Mar 2, 2026 23:10

[investigating] We are investigating reports of impacted performance for some GitHub services.

via statuspage
+1m
Mar 2, 2026 23:11

[investigating] Issues is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.

via statuspage
+1m
Mar 2, 2026 23:12

[investigating] Newly added issues can take up to 30 minutes to appear on project boards. We're investigating the cause of this delay.

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+34m
Mar 2, 2026 23:46

[investigating] Newly added issues are taking 30–60 minutes to appear on project boards, compared to the normal near-real-time behavior. We're investigating the root cause and possible mitigations.

via statuspage
+20m
Mar 3, 2026 00:05

[investigating] The impact extends beyond adding issues to project boards. Adding pull requests and updating fields such as "Status" may also be affected. We're continuing to investigate the root cause.

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+47m
Mar 3, 2026 00:52

[investigating] Project board updates — including adding issues, pull requests, and changing fields such as "Status" — are currently delayed by 1–2 hours. Normal behavior is near-real-time. We're actively investigating the root cause.

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+48m
Mar 3, 2026 01:40

[investigating] The delay for project board updates has increased to up to 3 hours. We've identified a potential cause and are working on remediation.

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+47m
Mar 3, 2026 02:27

[investigating] We're deploying a fix targeting the increased delay in GitHub Projects updates. The rollout should complete within 60 minutes. If successful, the current delay of up to 4 hours should begin to decrease.

via statuspage
+55m
Mar 3, 2026 03:22

[investigating] The fix is still building and is expected to deploy within 60 minutes. The current delay for GitHub Projects updates has increased to up to 5 hours.

via statuspage
+54m
Mar 3, 2026 04:17

[investigating] The fix has been deployed and processing speeds have returned to normal. There is a backlog of delayed updates that will continue to be worked through — we're estimating how long that will take and will provide an update in the next 60 minutes.

via statuspage
+20m
Mar 3, 2026 04:36

[investigating] The backlog of delayed updates is expected to fully clear within approximately 1 hour, after which project board updates will return to near-real-time.

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+1h 17m
Mar 3, 2026 05:53

[investigating] This incident has been resolved. Project board updates are now processing in near-real-time.

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+0m
Mar 3, 2026 05:54

[resolved] Between March 2, 21:42 UTC and March 3, 05:54 UTC project board updates, including adding new issues, PRs, and draft items to boards, were delayed from 30 minutes to over 2 hours, as a large backlog of messages accumulated in the Projects data denormalization pipeline.<br /><br />The incident was caused by an anomalously large event that required longer processing time than expected. Processing this message exceeded the Kafka consumer heartbeat timeout, triggering repeated consumer group rebalances. As a result, the consumer group was unable to make forward progress, creating head-of-line blocking that delayed processing of subsequent project board updates.<br /><br />We mitigated the issue by deploying a targeted fix that safely bypassed the offending message and allowed normal message consumption to resume. Consumer group stability recovered at 04:10 UTC, after which the backlog began draining. All queued messages were fully processed by 05:53 UTC, returning project board updates to normal processing latency.<br /><br />We have identified several follow-up improvements to reduce the likelihood and impact of similar incidents in the future, including improved monitoring and alerting, as well as introducing limits for unusually large project events.

via statuspage

Lessons Learned

GitHub has experienced 39 incidents in the past year. This frequency suggests systemic reliability challenges that may warrant additional monitoring.

📊Incidents related to database, capacity have occurred 29 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: Database Overload, Capacity Issue. Consider implementing preventive measures specific to this failure category.