Skip to content
GitHub · Developer toolsJul 21, 2026, 10:31 UTC

Some SSH connections using deploy keys are failing

CriticalNot disclosedUpdated 18h ago
Jul 21, 10:31 UTCJul 21, 11:57 UTC
Duration
1h 26m
Impact
Critical
Root cause
Not disclosed
GitHub, 90 days
68 incidents
Affected
Not listed by the vendor.
Status page

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

  1. 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
StartedIncidentDuration
Sep 2310:11 UTCIncident across several servicesOngoing
Sep 2022:13 UTCIncident with Pull Requests1h 9m
Sep 1720:59 UTCElevated rate of errors for OpenAI models provided by Copilot50m
Sep 1607:20 UTCDegradation with Gemini 3.8 Flash10h 28m
Sep 1519:11 UTCDisruption with some GitHub services49m
Sep 1509:47 UTCDisruption with some GitHub services1h 30m

From vendors' own status pages and disclosures. Times as reported. Logos via logo.dev; trademarks belong to their owners.

Weekly: the week's major outages, postmortems and breaches, Saturday mornings.