Incident with Copilot
Final update
On May 19, 2026, between 05:30 UTC and 14:50 UTC, some Copilot users experienced failures when using code completions, chat sessions, and cloud agent sessions. At peak impact, approximately 13% of Copilot API requests failed, and approximately 24% of remote sessions failed to initialize. A partial mitigation at 08:16 UTC reduced the Copilot API error rate to approximately 0.3%, but intermittent failures persisted until a full fix was deployed at 14:15 UTC and recovery was verified by 14:50 UTC. The incident was caused by rate limits being exceeded on a shared infrastructure component. A recently enabled feature increased call volume to this component, and the combined load exceeded capacity limits as traffic increased during business hours. We mitigated the incident by deploying a caching layer to reduce load on shared infrastructure. To prevent recurrence, we are separating rate limit scopes between services, adding monitoring for internal dependency rate limiting, and reducing redundant calls.
Timeline
- Resolved · May 19, 05:30 UTC
On May 19, 2026, between 05:30 UTC and 14:50 UTC, some Copilot users experienced failures when using code completions, chat sessions, and cloud agent sessions. At peak impact, approximately 13% of Copilot API requests failed, and approximately 24% of remote sessions failed to initialize. A partial mitigation at 08:16 UTC reduced the Copilot API error rate to approximately 0.3%, but intermittent failures persisted until a full fix was deployed at 14:15 UTC and recovery was verified by 14:50 UTC. The incident was caused by rate limits being exceeded on a shared infrastructure component. A recently enabled feature increased call volume to this component, and the combined load exceeded capacity limits as traffic increased during business hours. We mitigated the incident by deploying a caching layer to reduce load on shared infrastructure. To prevent recurrence, we are separating rate limit scopes between services, adding monitoring for internal dependency rate limiting, and reducing redundant calls.
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 |
Also caused by capacity and load
All| Started | Vendor | Incident | Impact | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 2213:19 UTC | We are investigating an issue with CH servers in Azure germanywestcentral region | minor | 5h 6m | |
| Sep 221:44 UTC | Elevated Linux worker queue times | minor | 21m | |
| Aug 2506:53 UTC | [Critical] Issue with Downloads | critical | 44m | |
| Aug 2015:40 UTC | We are investigating an issue where customers may experience timeouts, service degradations, errors, and elevated latencies across multiple products in the us-west1 region. | critical | 3h 40m | |
| Aug 1812:58 UTC | INC20000163 | major | 1h 54m | |
| Aug 1713:19 UTC | No capacity in ARN | none | 2h 22m |
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