GitHub Actions was down for more than two hours

GitHub Actions was degraded for more than two hours on May 26, 2026, after the platform's automated account review system suspended the service account it uses to authenticate workflow runs. GitHub classified the incident as critical and confirmed full recovery at 12:56 UTC.

What broke, and when

According to the incident report on GitHub's status page, Actions jobs were degraded between 10:40 UTC and 12:56 UTC. From 10:40 to 12:16 UTC every newly queued Actions run failed to start. From 12:16 to 12:56 UTC, runs that had to download actions for their workflows kept failing.

Other services went down with it because they depend on Actions: GitHub Pages, Copilot Code Review, Copilot coding agent, Octoshift and GitHub Enterprise Importer. The first public notice appeared at 10:57 UTC; at 11:53 UTC GitHub said the majority of Actions runs was affected. Developers also reported that the github-actions bot account appeared to be suspended.

The cause: an over-eager review system

GitHub blamed its own automated account review system, which "incorrectly suspended the service account used by GitHub Actions to authenticate workflow runs and download actions". The company restored the account at 12:16 UTC, marked it exempt from further automated review at 12:20 UTC, and redeployed a related service at 12:48 UTC to flush cached account state.

There was a side effect: while the account was disabled, a small number of Issues, pull requests, comments and discussions were marked as hidden. GitHub says no data was lost, that the hidden content has been restored, and that search index restoration was still in progress when the report was published.

What changes now

To prevent a repeat, GitHub has added an allowlist of service accounts that automated systems cannot suspend, and says it is enforcing those protections consistently across all account management tooling. It is also improving diagnostic tooling for accounts and working to reduce cache propagation delays so similar incidents can be mitigated faster.