GitHub Is Down: How Engineering Teams Stay Productive During Outages
GitHub outages happen a few times per year and typically last 30 minutes to 4 hours. Here's how to detect them early, keep your team productive, and minimize deployment delays.
Sofia is a senior infrastructure engineer at PulsAPI who specialises in on-call tooling and incident response automation. She has worked in SRE roles at cloud-native companies for over eight years.
Know Which GitHub Components Affect You
GitHub has multiple distinct service components, and outages rarely affect all of them simultaneously. The components most relevant to engineering teams are: Git Operations (push, pull, clone), GitHub Actions (CI/CD pipelines), GitHub API (anything that programmatically reads or writes to GitHub), GitHub Pages, and GitHub Packages. Understanding which components your workflow depends on determines how much an outage actually impacts you.
A Git Operations outage is the most disruptive — commits can't be pushed, branches can't be merged, deployments that require a fresh clone will fail. A GitHub Actions outage affects CI/CD but typically leaves git operations untouched, meaning developers can still commit and review code while pipelines queue. A GitHub API outage may break third-party tools that integrate with GitHub (Jira integrations, deployment automation, bots) without affecting basic git workflows.
PulsAPI monitors GitHub at the component level. Configure component-specific monitoring for the components your workflow depends on, and you'll get targeted alerts rather than generic 'GitHub is down' notifications that may or may not be relevant to your current work.
Staying Productive During a Git Operations Outage
Git is a distributed version control system — a fact that's easy to forget when you rely on GitHub as a central hub. During a GitHub Git Operations outage, local git operations still work perfectly. Developers can commit locally, create branches, merge locally, and run tests — they just can't push to or pull from GitHub remotes.
Productive tactics during a Git Operations outage: work from local branches, batch up commits that you'll push when GitHub recovers, run your full test suite locally, do code review via screen share or video call instead of GitHub PRs, and use the time for work that doesn't require remote git access (documentation, local testing, architecture discussions, design work).
For deployments that absolutely cannot wait (critical hotfixes), some teams maintain an emergency deploy path that doesn't depend on GitHub: a local machine that can push directly to a deployment environment, or an alternative git remote that serves as a temporary bypass. This is extreme but worth having documented for true P1 situations.
Managing CI/CD Pipelines During GitHub Actions Outages
GitHub Actions outages create queue buildup — commits stack up waiting for CI to run. When the outage resolves, a backlog of pipeline runs all start simultaneously, straining both GitHub's infrastructure and your own CI resources. Manage this proactively.
During a GitHub Actions outage: pause non-urgent merges to prevent the backlog from growing. Identify which pending PRs are blocking releases and note them for immediate attention post-recovery. If you have self-hosted runners, check whether they're affected (sometimes only GitHub-hosted runners are impacted). For critical releases, consider running your test suite locally against the commit you need to deploy rather than waiting for CI.
When Actions recovers, prioritize the CI queue: release-blocking PRs run first, then feature branches, then maintenance PRs. This manual triage prevents a situation where a non-urgent PR that merged just before the outage blocks a critical fix from getting CI approval.
Detection and Communication
Set up PulsAPI monitoring for GitHub before you need it. When developers start complaining that push is failing or Actions is queued, your team should already have a PulsAPI alert showing the affected component — not be in the middle of confirming whether it's a GitHub issue or a local problem.
Configure your GitHub monitoring in PulsAPI: navigate to pulsapi.com/services/github, subscribe to the components you care about, and route alerts to your engineering team's Slack channel. During business hours, this alert fires before most developers have even noticed the outage. After hours, it prevents unnecessary debugging by on-call engineers who might assume a deployment failure has an internal cause.
When a GitHub outage is confirmed, post immediately to your team's Slack: 'GitHub is experiencing a [component] outage. Expected impact: [description]. Monitoring pulsapi.com/services/github for updates. Continue work that doesn't require [affected functionality].' This 30-second communication prevents 10 duplicate 'is GitHub down?' threads and keeps your team focused.
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