Some SSH connections using deploy keys are failing
Final update
On July 21, 2026, between 07:41 UTC and 11:57 UTC, the SSH Authentication service was degraded and some SSH connections failed to authenticate. On average, 12.2% of SSH authentication requests failed, peaking at 15.7%. Both user RSA keys and deploy keys were impacted. This was due to a change in how our SSH service handled one public-key authentication method that caused the affected authentication attempts to be rejected as invalid. We mitigated the incident by reverting the change, after which SSH authentication returned to normal. We are working to expand our automated test coverage for our SSH public-key authentication flows to catch more edge cases and to improve observability and alerting on SSH authentication failures, to reduce our time to detection and mitigation of issues like this one in the future.
Timeline
- Resolved · Jul 21, 11:57 UTC
On July 21, 2026, between 07:41 UTC and 11:57 UTC, the SSH Authentication service was degraded and some SSH connections failed to authenticate. On average, 12.2% of SSH authentication requests failed, peaking at 15.7%. Both user RSA keys and deploy keys were impacted. This was due to a change in how our SSH service handled one public-key authentication method that caused the affected authentication attempts to be rejected as invalid. We mitigated the incident by reverting the change, after which SSH authentication returned to normal. We are working to expand our automated test coverage for our SSH public-key authentication flows to catch more edge cases and to improve observability and alerting on SSH authentication failures, to reduce our time to detection and mitigation of issues like this one in the future.
More from GitHub
Full history| Started | Incident | Impact | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 2310:11 UTC | Incident across several services | minor | Ongoing |
| Sep 2022:13 UTC | Incident with Pull Requests | minor | 1h 9m |
| Sep 1720:59 UTC | Elevated rate of errors for OpenAI models provided by Copilot | minor | 50m |
| Sep 1607:20 UTC | Degradation with Gemini 3.8 Flash | major | 10h 28m |
| Sep 1519:11 UTC | Disruption with some GitHub services | minor | 49m |
| Sep 1509:47 UTC | Disruption with some GitHub services | minor | 1h 30m |
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