Scheduled GitHub Actions workflow does not trigger in a private repository, while manual dispatch works

[PetrKohoutek]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Schedule & Cron Jobs

Discussion Details

I am experiencing an issue with GitHub Actions scheduled workflows in a private repository owned by my personal GitHub account.

The workflow file is .github/workflows/hourly.yml.

The problem appears to affect the schedule trigger of this particular workflow.

Expected behavior

The workflow was initially configured to run every weekday, every hour from 07:00 through 17:00 Central European local time, using:

schedule:

• cron: '0 7-17 * * 1-5'
  timezone: 'Europe/Prague'

The first expected run was Monday, October 12, 2026, at 07:00. Subsequent runs were expected every hour through 17:00.

Actual behavior

Monday, October 12: Only the 07:00 and 17:00 scheduled runs occurred. All intermediate hourly runs were missing.

Tuesday, October 13: The expected scheduled runs did not occur.

To rule out a possible issue with scheduling exactly on the hour, I changed the schedule to run at minute 7 of each hour, from 07:07 through 17:07. The expected runs at 12:07 and 13:07 did not occur.

I then reduced the schedule to just three runs per weekday:

schedule:

• cron: '7 8,14,16 * * 1-5'
  timezone: 'Europe/Prague'

The expected 14:07 run also did not occur.

Throughout these tests, manual runs using workflow_dispatch continued to work successfully. The workflow is enabled, and its YAML file is on the default branch.

What I have checked

The workflow is enabled.

The workflow file is on the default branch.

Manual dispatch works.

Other scheduled workflows in the same repository work.

The schedule was changed several times, including to a small number of runs at non-zero minutes past the hour.

The missing runs do not appear in the Actions run history.

Question

Could this be an issue with GitHub Actions schedule-event dispatching for a private repository or a personal Free-plan account?

Since manual dispatch works but scheduled runs are missing entirely, I would appreciate advice on how to determine why the schedule events are not being created or dispatched. I would prefer to avoid further arbitrary YAML changes without evidence that the schedule configuration is the cause.

The repository and account details have been omitted for privacy. I can provide additional technical details if needed.

Thank you.

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[DavidWindham]

We've been running into this at work also. I setup 2 cron based schedules for 2 workflows, but neither seem to run. With the following:

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '*/10 * * * *' 
      timezone: 'Europe/London'
  workflow_dispatch:

What's interesting is with this yaml, it did run once at about 11pm and again at aobut 4am, but it wasn't sticking to that 10 minute schedule.

Removing the timezone did nothing to help the situation. Perhaps cron based workflows are temporarily broken?
I also queried https://api.github.com/repos/<our_org>/<our_repo>/actions/runs and this gives some insight into the runs.

"event": "schedule",
is present if it was triggered by the cron job. Here's a small json of the last about 24 hours

`[{
"id": >,
"name": "",
"event": "schedule",
"status": "completed",
"conclusion": "success",
"triggered_by": "",
"created_at": "2026-10-13T03:10:06Z"
},

{
"id": ,
"name": "",
"event": "schedule",
"status": "completed",
"conclusion": "success",
"triggered_by": "",
"created_at": "2026-10-13T03:08:08Z"
},

{
"id": ,
"name": "",
"event": "schedule",
"status": "completed",
"conclusion": "success",
"triggered_by": "",
"created_at": "2026-10-12T22:34:18Z"
},

{
"id": ,
"name": "",
"event": "schedule",
"status": "completed",
"conclusion": "success",
"triggered_by": "",
"created_at": "2026-10-12T22:33:07Z"
},

{
"id": ,
"name": "",
"event": "workflow_dispatch",
"status": "completed",
"conclusion": "success",
"triggered_by": "",
"created_at": "2026-10-12T16:39:38Z"
}]
`

That's across 2 workflows. So github actions with a cron based schedule are running, but extremely intermittently? I've backed it off to once a day in-case asking for it too frequently was getting it blacklisted, but still no dice.

[PetrKohoutek]

thanks
same to me, I've backed it off to three times a day but it did not help :-(