What Caused GitHub's February 2026 Git Operations Outage?
On February 9, 2026 a configuration change to a user-settings cache set off a large volume of simultaneous cache rewrites. That overwhelmed shared infrastructure and exhausted connections in the service that proxies Git operations over HTTPS, so pushes and pulls over HTTPS failed in two periods (16:12 to 17:39 UTC and 18:53 to 20:09 UTC). SSH-based Git operations were not affected. GitHub disabled the cache rewrites and restarted the Git proxy.
The lesson for your own monitoring: check every entry point users rely on. An HTTPS check can fail while SSH keeps working, and the reverse.
Uptime Monitoring checks website responses and alerts you when a check fails.
What Caused GitHub's February 2026 Actions Hosted-Runner Outage?
On February 2, 2026 GitHub Actions hosted runners and Codespaces were unavailable from 18:35 to 22:20 UTC. Standard runners recovered at 23:10 UTC the same day, Codespaces at 00:15 UTC on February 3, and larger runners at 00:30 UTC on February 3. A loss of telemetry led GitHub's compute provider to apply security policies to backend storage accounts by mistake. Those policies blocked access to VM metadata, so creating, deleting and reimaging VMs failed, and jobs queued and timed out waiting for a runner. GitHub rolled the policy changes back starting at 22:15 UTC. Self-hosted runners on other providers were not affected.
Your website can stay up while CI is stuck, so watch job queue time in your CI tool as a separate signal. Performance Monitoring tracks your site's response times.
What Infrastructure Loss Triggered GitHub's Audit Log Service Connectivity Failure?
On April 1, 2026, GitHub's audit log service lost its connection to its data store for 28 minutes, from 15:34 to 16:02 UTC, after a failed credential rotation. Audit log history was unavailable through the API and the web interface, and GitHub restored service by recycling the affected environment. No audit log events were lost; they were written and streamed once service resumed.
The lesson: a credential change can break a service while its public pages still load, so alert on the failure itself (errors from the dependency, not just page uptime) and review rotation steps before running them.
SSL Monitoring checks website certificate validity and expiry, with default reminders at 13, 3 and 1 days.
What Uptime Metrics Does GitHub Publish and How Do They Measure Service Availability?
GitHub publishes per-component status and incident history at githubstatus.com, and a monthly availability report that describes each major incident. The February 2026 report covers six incidents, including the ones above.
Subscribe to the components you depend on (Git operations, Actions, API) so you hear about each one separately, then compare their incident times with your own monitoring data. Run the free Website Checker to see how your own site responds right now.
How Can Monitoring Tools Detect Early Signs of Service Outages Like GitHub's?
Visual Sentinel checks website uptime as often as every 1 minute on Business and Agency, or every 5 minutes on Solo and Starter, and checks DNS records on a schedule. An alert tells you a check failed so you can start investigating.
Configure uptime checks for the pages and APIs your users depend on, and add a DNS check for the domain they resolve through. DNS Monitoring alerts when records change or stop resolving. Write down your recovery steps and test them, and trigger a test alert so you know who is notified. Watch CI queue depth and runner startup time in your CI tool.
What Features Make UptimeRobot Effective for Preventing Website Service Outages?
UptimeRobot's free plan gives 50 monitors with 5-minute intervals (HTTP, port, ping and keyword), paid plans check every 60 seconds or faster, and DNS and SSL checks need a paid plan.
Paid plans run from Solo (10 monitors, $13 monthly or $12 annual) through Team (100 monitors, $46 monthly or $39 annual) to Scale (200 monitors, $98 monthly or $79 annual).
UptimeRobot sends SSL expiry reminders 30, 14, 7 and 1 day before expiry on paid plans, and its port monitors cover any TCP port. SMS and voice alerts use credits, with some included on paid plans.
Compare UptimeRobot with Visual Sentinel in Visual Sentinel vs UptimeRobot.
How Does Pingdom's Check Intervals Help in Early Detection of Service Outages?
Pingdom (SolarWinds) offers 1-minute to 60-minute check intervals and 30-second timeouts for HTTP/HTTPS, TCP and DNS (Ping uses 5 seconds per packet), with no free plan (only a 30-day trial) and an entry tier of 10 uptime checks at $16.50 a month on annual billing ($18 monthly). Pingdom advertises over 100 global locations.
Pingdom has no free plan, only a 30-day trial. The entry tier supports 10 uptime checks at $16.50 per month on annual billing ($18 monthly), and 100 uptime checks cost $136.42 per month on annual billing ($149 monthly).
Pingdom alerts on response times above a threshold you set per check.
Integrations include Slack and PagerDuty.
| Entity | Free plan | Paid plan prices | Check intervals | Supported protocols | Integrations |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pingdom (SolarWinds) | No free plan (30-day trial) | 10 uptime checks $16.50 annual / $18 monthly; 100 checks $136.42 / $149 | 1 min to 60 min | HTTP/HTTPS, Ping, TCP, UDP, DNS, SMTP, POP3, IMAP | Slack, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, webhooks |
| UptimeRobot | 50 monitors, 5 min (HTTP, port, ping, keyword) | Solo $13 monthly / $12 annual (10 monitors); Team $46 / $39 (100 monitors) | 5 min Free, 60 s Solo, 30 s Team, 15 s Scale | HTTP/HTTPS, Ping, TCP; DNS and SSL on paid plans | Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, webhooks (by plan) |
| Datadog | Infrastructure Free, up to 5 hosts | Infrastructure Pro $15/host billed annually; Synthetics billed per run | Synthetic tests as often as every 30 s | HTTP, SSL, DNS, WebSocket, TCP, UDP, ICMP | Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, webhooks |
See how Visual Sentinel compares with Pingdom in Visual Sentinel vs Pingdom.
What Role Do Visual Sentinel's Checks Play in Avoiding GitHub-Like Outages?
Visual Sentinel checks uptime, performance, SSL, DNS and visual changes. Content monitoring starts on Starter. Each follows its own schedule.
Uptime checks run every 5 minutes on Solo and Starter or every 1 minute on Business and Agency. Website performance checks provide supported page measurements. Default certificate expiry reminders are at 13, 3 and 1 days.
DNS records are checked on a schedule. Visual checks run every 30 minutes on Solo and every 15 minutes on Starter and above. A single expected-text setting is available on every plan; must-contain and must-not-contain keyword rules are available from Starter.
Configure supported notifications and test them. Start with Speed Test to inspect website performance.
How to Integrate Performance and Visual Monitoring for Comprehensive Service Outage Prevention?
When a site misbehaves but stays up, compare response times with visual and content alerts to see what changed. Visual Monitoring compares scheduled screenshots of your pages (every 30 minutes on Solo, every 15 on Starter and above), and Content Monitoring alerts when a must-contain or must-not-contain keyword rule fails. Together they catch a page that answers with a 200 but looks or reads wrong. Content monitoring starts on Starter.
Read more articles on monitoring.
Test your monitoring and recovery against the services you run. Run the free Website Checker, then start a 7-day trial from pricing (card required) to keep uptime, DNS, SSL and page checks running.
To hear when your own site goes down, see how uptime alerts work in Visual Sentinel.
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Check a site freeCommon questions
What Caused GitHub's February 2026 Git Operations Outage?
On February 9, 2026 a configuration change to a user-settings cache set off a large volume of simultaneous cache rewrites. That overwhelmed shared infrastructure and exhausted connections in the service that proxies Git operations over HTTPS, so pushes and pulls over HTTPS failed in two periods (16:12 to 17:39 UTC and 18:53 to 20:09 UTC). SSH-based Git operations were not affected.
What Caused GitHub's February 2026 Actions Hosted-Runner Outage?
On February 2, 2026 GitHub Actions hosted runners and Codespaces were unavailable from 18:35 to 22:20 UTC. Standard runners recovered at 23:10 UTC the same day, Codespaces at 00:15 UTC on February 3, and larger runners at 00:30 UTC on February 3. A loss of telemetry led GitHub's compute provider to apply security policies to backend storage accounts by mistake, which blocked access to VM metadata.
What Infrastructure Loss Triggered GitHub's Audit Log Service Connectivity Failure?
On April 1, 2026 GitHub's audit log service lost its connection to its data store for 28 minutes, from 15:34 to 16:02 UTC, after a failed credential rotation. No audit log events were lost; they were written and streamed once service resumed.
What Uptime Metrics Does GitHub Publish and How Do They Measure Service Availability?
GitHub publishes per-component status and incident history at githubstatus.com, and a monthly availability report that describes each major incident.
How Can Monitoring Tools Detect Early Signs of Service Outages Like GitHub's?
Visual Sentinel checks website uptime as often as every 1 minute on Business and Agency, or every 5 minutes on Solo and Starter, and checks DNS records on a schedule. An alert tells you a check failed so you can start investigating.
What Features Make UptimeRobot Effective for Preventing Website Service Outages?
UptimeRobot's free plan gives 50 monitors with 5-minute intervals (HTTP, port, ping and keyword), paid plans check every 60 seconds or faster, and DNS and SSL checks need a paid plan.
What Role Do Visual Sentinel's Checks Play in Avoiding GitHub-Like Outages?
Visual Sentinel checks website uptime, performance, SSL, DNS, screenshots and content on their own schedules. Those signals show what failed so you can investigate; they do not by themselves prevent an outage like GitHub's.
