GitHub Outage Hits Copilot, Webhooks, Actions and PR Merge Queue

On April 24, 2024 (UTC+8) GitHub experienced a global service disruption that impacted core developer tools such as Copilot, Webhooks, and Actions. The operations team began root‑cause investigation at 00:12, as recorded on the official status board.

Initially only Copilot and Webhooks showed reduced availability; the problem quickly spread, causing multiple core services to become unavailable and a noticeable degradation in Actions performance. By 00:52 the team pinpointed the fault and started remediation, and the outage was declared resolved at 01:30.

During the same window GitHub disclosed a separate Pull Request (PR) incident. A regression bug in the merge queue caused some PRs to be merged incorrectly, undermining branch‑protection rules and automated CI/CD checks. The merge queue normally validates branch safety, synchronises the target branch with the latest code, and runs comprehensive checks before completing a merge to prevent version‑compatibility risks.

While handling the first outage, GitHub gradually optimised scheduling, patched vulnerabilities, and restored Actions throughput, as well as resolved Copilot and Webhooks anomalies. The PR merge issue entered investigation at 03:50; the root cause was identified as a regression triggered by specific operations such as compress‑merge and rebase‑merge modes. After a targeted fix, the PR‑related fault was fully cleared at 05:43.

GitHub indicated that a detailed post‑mortem will be published to outline the complete incident timeline and root cause.