GitHub Actions Have "Major Outage" | Hacker News Reader

GitHub Actions Have "Major Outage"

53 pointsgraton17 comments

Currently the GitHub status page says there is a "Major Outage" for GitHub Actions.

https://www.githubstatus.com/

This is as of 19:58 UTC / 11:58 PST on 2-Feb-2026

Looks like Azure as a platform just killed the ability for VM scale operations, due to a change on a storage account ACL that hosted VM extensions. Wow... We noticed when github actions went down, then our self hosted runners because we can't scale anymore.

Information

Active - Virtual Machines and dependent services - Service management issues in multiple regions

Impact statement: As early as 19:46 UTC on 2 February 2026, we are aware of an ongoing issue causing customers to receive error notifications when performing service management operations - such as create, delete, update, scaling, start, stop - for Virtual Machines (VMs) across multiple regions. These issues are also causing impact to services with dependencies on these service management operations - including Azure Arc Enabled Servers, Azure Batch, Azure DevOps, Azure Load Testing, and GitHub. For details on the latter, please see https://www.githubstatus.com.

Current status: We have determined that these issues were caused by a recent configuration change that affected public access to certain Microsoft‑managed storage accounts, used to host extension packages. We are actively working on mitigation, including updating configuration to restore relevant access permissions. We have applied this update in one region so far, and are assessing the extent to which this mitigates customer issues. Our next update will be provided by 22:30 UTC, approximately 60 minutes from now.

https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status

Clickable link https://www.githubstatus.com/

( Or if you prefer https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/xwn6hjps36ty )

Thanks. When I tried to use the https://www.githubstatus.com/ link it wouldn't let me submit. Now I will remember to use the incident link in the future. I hadn't noticed that before.

The real lock-in is stars, not reliability [1].

They can have weekly outages, and the FOSS products would still be forced to be on GitHub.

1 - https://ashishb.net/tech/github-stars/

I have literally never looked at github stars as a measure of quality or had it affect my decision. I have looked at git logs, websites, issues, etc. But I would be genuinely worried if someone used github stars as an indication. So many honestly stupid projects have a lot of stars, and stellar ones have next to none.

https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking/blob/master/Top100/...

proof here. The top are taken by chinese educational repos. Elastic Search and Spring Boot are the only projects actually used by anyone in the top 10. But why would I trust the stars for spring boot over the fact its used in every java shop on the planet?

The hacker News crowd has always these elitist takes

  - I don't look at GitHub Stars
  - I don't use Facebook
  - I am never persuaded by advertisement
  - I can build Dropbox over a weekend

Even if these are true, it is irrelevant. Hacker News is only a sliver of the tech world.

If I am sitting in a review session and the Engineer presenting brings up their options and why they are choosing to bring in technology A over B, and I ask them what their reasoning is. Being unsatisfied by "There are a lot of Github stars" Seems like an absolutely reasonable position to me. This is the equivalent of saying that something seems more true because it has a lot of facebook likes.

GitHub Stars are not a selection mechanism. They are filtering mechanism for most people.

Imagine someone is choosing between three FOSS projects - one has 90K stars, one has 30K and the thirdone has 1K.

In your meeting, the engineer will show you how he decided between the first and the second without even mentioning the third.

Another anecdote chiming in here. I've literally never paid attention to GitHub stars for anything important. Except if a repo of a big project has few stars I double check because I'm probably looking at a fork instead of the main repo.

Good for you champ.

I don't rely on stars as the main signal of quality, but very low stars could stop me from looking into the things that I do use as a signal:

   - number of contributors
   - open issues
   - merged and unmerged PRs
   - commit history
   - the code
   - project governance

Some of these are also tied into GitHub rather than the git repo itself

I came to a similar conclusion - that GitHub benefits from a network effect similar to social media. I would really like to leave GitHub, but it's where stuff is happening. Any company seriously looking to replace GitHub should pay some attention the social network aspect of it.

> Any company seriously looking to replace GitHub should pay some attention the social network aspect of it.

Indeed. And I would say it is not just social signals but even non-social authority signals.

E.g. how many other projects depend on this projects and how many downloads happen for its artifacts.

You can see some of these on package registries like npm and pypi where their authority signals help people choose between the right libraries.

Not a huge surprise but Azure DevOps, seems to have the same issue. https://status.dev.azure.com/_event/742338411

Wow, first one in a week!

I think they've just stopped caring about the consequences at this point, they know they have enough market dominance and lock-in that they can go down as often as they like.

Besides the frequent outages, GitHub is largely being left to rot because they're distracted by AI. Actions is a security catastrophe. I can't point to a single feature that they've shipped in the past year that pushes the bar.

I've spent hours debugging random intermittent CI failures for nothing then! fml

Is this only GitHub? I noticed other pages and services being extremely slow or erroring more often. Claude errored on file uploads, LinkedIn took 1minute+ to load a simple page.

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