Code view fails to load when content contains some non-ASCII characters
Final update
Starting February 26, 2026 at 22:10 UTC through February 27, 05:50 UTC, the repository browsing UI was degraded and users were unable to load pages for files and directories with non-ASCII characters (including Japanese, Chinese, and other non-Latin scripts). On average, the error rate was 0.014% and peaked at 0.06% of requests to the service. Affected users saw 404 errors when navigating to repository directories and files with non-ASCII names. This was due to a code change that altered how file and directory names were processed, which caused incorrectly formatted data to be stored in an application cache. We mitigated the incident by deploying a fix that invalidated the affected cache entries and progressively rolling it out across all production environments. We are working to improve our pre-production testing to cover non-ASCII character handling, establish better cache invalidation mechanisms, and enhance our monitoring to detect this type of failure mode earlier, to reduce our time to detection and mitigation of issues like this one in the future.
Timeline
- Resolved · Feb 27, 06:04 UTC
Starting February 26, 2026 at 22:10 UTC through February 27, 05:50 UTC, the repository browsing UI was degraded and users were unable to load pages for files and directories with non-ASCII characters (including Japanese, Chinese, and other non-Latin scripts). On average, the error rate was 0.014% and peaked at 0.06% of requests to the service. Affected users saw 404 errors when navigating to repository directories and files with non-ASCII names. This was due to a code change that altered how file and directory names were processed, which caused incorrectly formatted data to be stored in an application cache. We mitigated the incident by deploying a fix that invalidated the affected cache entries and progressively rolling it out across all production environments. We are working to improve our pre-production testing to cover non-ASCII character handling, establish better cache invalidation mechanisms, and enhance our monitoring to detect this type of failure mode earlier, 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 |
From vendors' own status pages and disclosures. Times as reported. Logos via logo.dev; trademarks belong to their owners.