Incident with Copilot agent sessions

lowGitHubCopilotFeb 27, 2026 23:18Duration: 31m
computeauthentication
Capacity IssueAuthentication Issue

Summary

On February 27, 2026, between 22:53 UTC and 23:46 UTC, the Copilot coding agent service experienced elevated errors and degraded functionality for agent sessions. Approximately 87% of attempts to start or interact with agent sessions encountered errors during this period.<br /><br />This was due to an expired authentication credential for an internal service component, which prevented Copilot agent session operations from completing successfully.<br /><br />We mitigated the incident by rotating

Impact

minor

Timeline

Feb 27, 2026 23:18

[investigating] We are investigating reports of degraded performance for Copilot

via statuspage
+0m
Feb 27, 2026 23:18

[investigating] We are investigating a spike in errors in Copilot agent sessions

via statuspage
+17m
Feb 27, 2026 23:35

[investigating] We are investigating networking issues with some requests to our models.

via statuspage
+10m
Feb 27, 2026 23:45

[investigating] We have identified the cause of the elevated errors and are rolling out a fix to production. We are observing initial recovery in Copilot agent sessions.

via statuspage
+3m
Feb 27, 2026 23:49

[resolved] On February 27, 2026, between 22:53 UTC and 23:46 UTC, the Copilot coding agent service experienced elevated errors and degraded functionality for agent sessions. Approximately 87% of attempts to start or interact with agent sessions encountered errors during this period.<br /><br />This was due to an expired authentication credential for an internal service component, which prevented Copilot agent session operations from completing successfully.<br /><br />We mitigated the incident by rotating the expired credential and deploying the updated configuration to production. Services began recovering within minutes of the fix being deployed.<br /><br />We are working to improve automated credential rotation coverage across all Copilot service components, add proactive alerting for credentials approaching expiration, and validate configuration consistency to reduce our time to detection and mitigation of issues like this one in the future.

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 compute, authentication have occurred 52 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: Capacity Issue, Authentication Issue. Consider implementing preventive measures specific to this failure category.