The Pattern
GitHub Actions experienced multiple service disruptions over the past week. On February 2, StatusGator logged 12 user-reported issues in 24 hours - including an 11-minute incident, 40-minute workflow delays, and stuck job queues. All resolved, but not before teams burned hours restarting pipelines.
The problem isn't just the outages. It's that developers default to troubleshooting their configs before checking if GitHub itself is down.
What Enterprises Should Know
GitHub Actions powers CI/CD for millions of developers. When it's degraded, builds queue indefinitely. Jobs wait for runners that never come online. Status reports say "waiting for status to be reported" - which means nothing is happening.
Recent incidents:
- February 2: Performance issues across services (17:58 UTC)
- February 1: Actions workflows affected
- January 28: Run start delays
- January 26: ~11% failure rate on Windows runners post-rollback
APAC teams should bookmark githubstatus.com and regional pages for Australia/Japan. StatusGator's third-party monitoring caught issues faster than GitHub's official notices in some cases.
Self-Hosted Runners Aren't Immune
Self-hosted runners offer some mitigation - your infrastructure, your control. But they introduce new failure modes: Docker misconfigurations, service status problems, timeout issues on job assignment.
The trade-off: less exposure to GitHub's hosted runner queues, more operational overhead on your team.
The Real Cost
Ten to twelve user-reported outages in a 24-hour window adds up. Senior engineers spending an hour restarting workflows is expensive. Deployment windows missed. Release schedules slipped.
Microsoft (GitHub's owner) dominates CI/CD with over 3 million organizations using Actions. That market position doesn't prevent partial outages - it just means they affect more teams.
Check First, Restart Second
Before burning an hour on troubleshooting:
- Visit githubstatus.com
- Check StatusGator or Downdetector for user reports
- Review your runner logs only if GitHub shows green
The visibility problem isn't new. Users have complained about poor incident communication for years. Until that improves, bookmark the status page.