What the GitHub Outage Taught Us About Resilience and Compliance in 2026

February 9, 2026 was a rough day for teams that run on GitHub. The platform didn't just hiccup once; it went down five separate times over about twelve hours. For anyone stuck refreshing status pages, watching CI/CD queues pile up, or wondering if that production deploy actually went out, the takeaway was clear: the real issue isn't that GitHub had a bad day. It's what that day revealed about how we design and depend on systems in 2026.

What Actually Happened

From 08:15 UTC onward, GitHub saw a series of cascading failures touching almost every major product. A quick recap:

• 08:15-11:26 – Pull Requests, Webhooks, Issues, Actions, and Git Operations saw intermittent timeouts after a faulty infrastructure component was identified and failed over. Around 1% of requests were affected.
• 10:01-12:12 – Copilot Coding Agent experienced degradation.
• 14:17-15:46 – Actions run-start delays impacted roughly 4% of users because of a pipeline bottleneck.
• 15:54-19:29 – Notification delivery slipped to an average of about 1 hour 20 minutes latency.
• 16:19-17:40 – A major incident: Pull Requests, Issues, Actions, Git Operations, Webhooks, and Pages all degraded with intermittent errors.
• 19:01-20:09 – A second major incident hit Actions, Copilot, Issues, Git, Webhooks, Pages, Pull Requests, Packages, and Codespaces.

That's five distinct incidents, two of them platform-wide, on a service the industry treats as core infrastructure. GitHub has been in the middle of a migration from its legacy datacenter to Azure since October 2025, and the half-migrated state has been a source of ongoing instability. For a platform positioning itself as the center of the development ecosystem, "down to a single 9" across services is a sobering place to be.

Why the Impact Was So Wide

In 2026, a GitHub outage is far more than "we can't push code for a bit." So much is built on top of it that a single bad day ripples everywhere:

• CI/CD came to a halt. Teams on GitHub Actions saw builds queue, fail, or never start. Deploys didn't run. Many had to monitor manually to see what had and hadn't gone through.
• Webhooks fell behind by up to 2.5 hours. Anything that depends on webhooks (Slack, deploy pipelines, monitoring) went quiet or out of date.
• Go builds broke in the broad. The Go module system pulls from GitHub. When GitHub is unavailable, go build fails. That's true for every Go project, not just yours.
• GitHub Pages deployments stalled. Docs, marketing sites, and dev portals sat waiting. We felt that one ourselves.

A single provider's bad day turned into a bad day for everyone. That points to an architecture and dependency problem, not just a GitHub one.

AI Tools Are in the Chain Too

The 2026 angle is how much AI-assisted development is now part of that chain.

Copilot Coding Agent was down in two of the incidents. So were other AI coding tools that rely on GitHub for repo context, file access, or search. Anything that clones or reads from GitHub (Claude Code, Codex, and the like) was impaired. The stack looks like: AI coding tool → GitHub API → Azure. Each layer is a potential single point of failure; when one breaks, the whole chain can go dark.

There's an uncomfortable mismatch: we're layering more and more AI-powered workflows on top of infrastructure that still can't consistently serve basic operations like pull requests. For engineering and security leaders, that’s a resilience and risk issue, not just a convenience one.

Compliance Evidence When the Platform Is Down

This is where it gets serious for anyone using GitHub as part of their compliance story.

Lots of organizations rely on GitHub Pull Requests for SOC 2 change management evidence. Reviews, approvals, and merge history are the audit trail that shows your change management controls are working. When GitHub is down, you can't create PRs, approve them, or merge them. Your control is effectively offline. Not because your process failed, but because a critical control lives entirely inside a third-party service.

It gets worse when policies name the vendor. In many companies, compliance documents don't say "version control with peer review"; they say "GitHub." Locking a control to a specific product creates a hidden single point of failure. Auditors look at your controls, not GitHub's uptime. If your control depends on a service that had five outages in one day, that's on your risk register.

The remedy is to define controls by what they achieve, not by product names. Policies should require something like "peer-reviewed code changes with documented approval in an auditable system," not "an approved GitHub Pull Request." That keeps you compliant and gives you room to adapt when a vendor has a bad day or you need to change tools.

Practical Steps to Take

Here are five concrete steps for engineering and security leaders:

1. Map everything that touches GitHub. List every system that calls a GitHub API or depends on a webhook: CI/CD, deploy triggers, compliance workflows. The dependency graph is usually deeper than people expect.

2. Define a deployment bypass. Have a written, tested way to ship to production when GitHub (or Actions) is unavailable. Not a replacement for normal process, but a clear "glass break" path for critical fixes. If you didn't have one on February 9, you know why you need one now.

3. Loosen the CI/CD tie-in. Look at self-hosted runners or other CI (GitLab CI, CircleCI, Buildkite) for critical pipelines so you can keep building when github.com isn’t there. At least mirror repos so builds don’t depend on a single endpoint.

4. Tighten compliance wording. Find every policy that names a specific vendor and reframe around the control. Swap "GitHub Pull Request" for "peer-reviewed code change with documented approval." You keep the control; you gain flexibility during outages and future tool changes.

5. Think through AI tool dependency. If your team leans on AI coding assistants (and most do in 2026), know what happens when those tools lose access to your code. Can people still ship? Plan for AI tool outages the same way you plan for any other critical dependency.

The Underlying Pattern

The February 9 outage is a reminder that we've built a lot on top of tightly coupled systems. GitHub is critical infrastructure, but it’s still a commercial SaaS product with the reliability that implies. The teams that got through that day in better shape were the ones that already treated GitHub as a dependency to plan for: fallbacks, bypass procedures, and compliance language that doesn’t assume one vendor is always up.

Everyone else got a costly lesson in resilience.

If that day surfaced gaps in your dependency map or compliance posture, book a free strategy call and we can walk through your setup before the next incident.