Scheduled (cron) GitHub Actions workflows not firing

[tjj0rdan]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Schedule & Cron Jobs

Discussion Details

Scheduled (cron) GitHub Actions workflows have never fired on my account, across two different repositories, over a full day of testing. Manual workflow_dispatch runs of the exact same workflows succeed reliably and quickly every time (typically 1-4 minutes). GitHub Support wouldn't let me raise a ticket for this (I'm on a free personal account), so posting here in case anyone from GitHub or the community has seen this before.

Account: created 2026-08-26 (~1 day old at the time of testing)

What I tested:

• tjj0rdan/fara-monitor (private): .github/workflows/daily-fetch.yml, cron: "15 7 * * *" — missed its 07:15 UTC production slot on 2026-08-27.
• Same repo/workflow: temporarily retargeted the cron to a near-future slot the same day as a live test — did not fire (checked with 12+ min buffer).
• Same repo, a second independent workflow (scheduler-probe.yml, trivial echo job, its own schedule trigger) — did not fire (checked with 30+ min buffer, zero runs of any kind recorded).
• A brand-new, unrelated scratch repo (tjj0rdan/scheduler-scratch-test) created purely to isolate the issue — trivial workflow, own schedule trigger — also did not fire (checked with 40+ min buffer).
• gh run list across all of the above shows only workflow_dispatch-triggered runs; zero schedule-triggered runs exist anywhere on this account, on any repo.

Ruled out:

• Not a fork
• Workflow state is active (not disabled) on all tested workflows
• Repo actions/permissions: enabled: true, allowed_actions: "all"
• Not the 60-day-inactivity auto-disable (everything here is 1 day old)
• Not a billing/Actions-minutes issue (manual dispatches succeed instantly and repeatedly)
• No relevant incident on githubstatus.com at the times tested
• No "GitHub Actions is currently disabled for this repository/account" banner visible anywhere in the UI
• Given the account age, my working theory is some kind of anti-abuse/trust restriction on scheduled Actions for brand-new accounts, but I can't confirm that from public docs, and Support (via the AI triage) couldn't confirm or deny it either — it explicitly said this would need a human/backend review.

Has anyone seen this before, or know if there's a known ramp-up period for scheduled triggers on new accounts? Happy to provide more detail if useful.

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[tjj0rdan]

Update: Checking GitHub's status page, two incidents line up almost exactly with when this repo/workflow was created:

• "Incident with Actions" (critical, 15:02–18:01 UTC Aug 26) — "Actions jobs failed to start... triggered by saturation of writes to the database primary..." My workflow was first pushed at 16:08 UTC that same day, right inside this window.
• "Incident with Actions and Pull Requests" (minor, 22:56 UTC Aug 26 – 00:26 UTC Aug 27) — "...up to 4% of runs failed to trigger."

Theory: registering a schedule trigger is likely a DB write separate from the workflow file itself. If that write got dropped during the primary failover, the workflow would still exist and dispatch manually fine (matches what I see) but never actually register with the scheduler.

One thing this doesn't fully explain: I also created a brand-new, unrelated repo at 13:42 UTC on Aug 27 (well after both incidents resolved), and its schedule also never fired — so this looks more like something got stuck at the account level, not just a one-time write loss on this one workflow.

Would appreciate a check on whether this account's scheduling state was affected by either incident.

[redfalcon6]

I have this exact same issue - my chronned workflows have worked thousands of times and now are not firing. I can kick off manually. I created a new workflow from scratch with a schedule and it does not fire....