What Broke GitHub on August 17 and How Retries Made the Incident Worse
3 min read GitHub’s incident on 17 August 2026 ran from 13:28 to 21:15 UTC, seven hours and forty-seven minutes. At peak, web and API traffic saw error rates of around 20%, while archive and raw-content downloads reached roughly 50%. SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM and Team Sync were affected alongside Git operations, Actions, Pages, Issues, Pull Requests
