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MicrosoftGitHubCopilotInfrastructureGitHub Suffers Worldwide Outage Taking Copilot Offline
August 17, 20262 min read
GitHub experienced a significant global outage on August 17 that degraded web, API, and authentication services and took GitHub Copilot offline for many users.
Why it matters
As AI coding assistants become core to developer workflows, outages at platforms like GitHub now have outsized impact on productivity across the industry.
GitHub confirmed a widespread service degradation on August 17, 2026 that affected the web experience, API, repository downloads, and authentication systems including SAML, OIDC, and SCIM. Error rates reached roughly 20% on core services and higher on some archive and download paths.
Because GitHub Copilot is deeply integrated with the platform, many developers also lost access to AI coding assistance during the incident. Microsoft status updates indicated the issue was being actively mitigated through the morning and early afternoon US time.
The outage is a reminder that the infrastructure layer supporting AI developer tools remains a single point of failure for large parts of the software industry.