Repositories repeatedly showing as "Updated" with no commits or visible changes — now happened ~12 times

[devziaulqamar]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

Body

Hi GitHub Community,

I'm reporting this again because the issue has continued and has now happened approximately 12 times.

A large number of my repositories — sometimes around 50–70% of them — suddenly appear as "Updated" in my GitHub repository list.

However, when I open the affected repositories, I cannot find any corresponding activity:

No new commits
No branch changes
No pull requests
No releases
No visible file/code changes
No unexpected activity that explains the timestamp

The affected repositories appear to be random, and the same behavior has happened repeatedly over the last several weeks.

I previously posted about this on LinkedIn and also raised the issue with GitHub Support. I was advised that the updated_at timestamp can differ from pushed_at and that metadata or internal GitHub processes may potentially cause this.

However, the fact that this has now happened around 12 times makes me concerned that there may be something specific triggering these updates.

What I would like to understand

Can someone from GitHub confirm exactly what can cause a repository's updated_at timestamp to change without:

a commit
a branch update
a PR
a release
or another visible repository activity?

Could GitHub's internal processes such as indexing, security scanning, repository synchronization, or other background jobs cause this?

I would also like to know whether there is any way for a repository owner to identify the exact event that caused updated_at to change.

I am happy to provide timestamps, affected repository names, updated_at, pushed_at, and latest commit SHAs to GitHub Support if that would help investigate this.

This is now the 12th occurrence, so I would really appreciate if someone could help determine whether this is expected GitHub behavior or a platform issue.

I also found another Community discussion describing very similar behavior:
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/193052

Has anyone else experienced this repeatedly

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