Microsoft-owned GitHub was dealing with a widespread outage Monday affecting some users across its website and several core developer services, according to BleepingComputer. Techmeme also picked up the report, summarizing it as Microsoft saying GitHub was down worldwide. BleepingComputer reports that GitHub confirmed the incident at 9:40 AM EDT on August 17, 2026, saying it was investigating performance problems across parts of the platform. Techmeme lists the same confirmation time as 13:40 UTC. The impacted surface area is broad. According to BleepingComputer, services affected included the GitHub web experience, API Requests, Actions, Webhooks, Issues and Pull Requests. The report also says authentication-related services were affected, including Security Assertion Markup Language, OpenID Connect, System for Cross-domain Identity Management and Team Sync. The most concrete numbers come from GitHub’s status page as cited by BleepingComputer: error rates were around 20% across the web experience and API traffic. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads were seeing higher error rates of approximately 50%. Users were reporting server errors and trouble loading commits, repositories and Pull Request pages, according to BleepingComputer. Because GitHub Actions was degraded, the incident could also interfere with automated builds, tests, deployments and other continuous integration and continuous delivery workflows that depend on the platform. The outage also extended into GitHub’s AI coding product. BleepingComputer reports that at 10:31 AM EDT, GitHub said Copilot was experiencing degraded availability. Not every GitHub service was listed as affected. BleepingComputer says Git Operations, Packages, Pages and Codespaces were marked operational at the time of its report, even as several high-usage services remained degraded. GitHub had not disclosed a cause, according to BleepingComputer, and the investigation was still ongoing. The available reports do not yet provide a restoration timeline or an explanation for why the affected services were failing. Who benefits: There is no clear beneficiary from the available reporting. The immediate operational advantage goes only to teams whose workflows are less dependent on the affected GitHub services. Who's exposed: Developers and organizations relying on GitHub’s website, API, Pull Requests, Actions, authentication integrations or Copilot are exposed to delays and failed workflows while the incident continues.