Incident with Webhooks

Final update

Between 14:24 and 14:53 UTC on 13 August 2026, a routine background job to delete an organization overwhelmed a key shared database, causing multiple GitHub services to briefly return elevated errors and slower responses. Most affected was the webhook management API, with smaller impact to Git operations, pull requests, issues, packages, sign-in, and Copilot. Impact cleared on its own at about 14:53 UTC once the job finished; we resolved the incident at 15:36 UTC. Affected users may have experienced a brief increase in errors and slower responses, primarily when creating, listing, or updating webhooks, with smaller impacts to pull requests, issues, packages, and Git operations. Failures peaked at about 1% for several minutes around 14:37 UTC. To prevent future incidents, we've already shipped an update that turns on the safer deletion path for organizations, along with caps on deletion holds on databases. Building on these changes, we're auditing all bulk deletion and cleanup jobs that write to shared databases to prevent similar issues in future.

1. Resolved · Aug 13, 15:36 UTC
   Between 14:24 and 14:53 UTC on 13 August 2026, a routine background job to delete an organization overwhelmed a key shared database, causing multiple GitHub services to briefly return elevated errors and slower responses. Most affected was the webhook management API, with smaller impact to Git operations, pull requests, issues, packages, sign-in, and Copilot. Impact cleared on its own at about 14:53 UTC once the job finished; we resolved the incident at 15:36 UTC. Affected users may have experienced a brief increase in errors and slower responses, primarily when creating, listing, or updating webhooks, with smaller impacts to pull requests, issues, packages, and Git operations. Failures peaked at about 1% for several minutes around 14:37 UTC. To prevent future incidents, we've already shipped an update that turns on the safer deletion path for organizations, along with caps on deletion holds on databases. Building on these changes, we're auditing all bulk deletion and cleanup jobs that write to shared databases to prevent similar issues in future.
2. Monitoring · Aug 13, 15:33 UTC
   We have temporarily disabled a background job which caused the impact. At this time the impact is fully mitigated.
3. Monitoring · Aug 13, 15:33 UTC
   The degradation affecting Git Operations, Issues, Packages, Pull Requests and Webhooks has been mitigated. We are monitoring to ensure stability.
4. Investigating · Aug 13, 14:58 UTC
   We are currently investigating a brief degradation of service for Git operations (specifically pushes), issues, pull requests, package registry, and webhooks between 14:32 and 14:46 UTC. We have identified the source of the degradation and are investigating mitigation strategies to prevent recurrence.
5. Investigating · Aug 13, 14:56 UTC
   Packages is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
6. Investigating · Aug 13, 14:46 UTC
   Git Operations is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
7. Investigating · Aug 13, 14:46 UTC
   Issues is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
8. Investigating · Aug 13, 14:46 UTC
   Pull Requests is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
9. Investigating · Aug 13, 14:45 UTC
   We are investigating reports of degraded performance for Webhooks