GitHub Actions validation jobs stuck before first step — BlobNotFound and no logs

[mae-muz]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Actions Runner

Discussion Details

Hello GitHub Support,

My private repository, mae-muz/mae-project, has repeated problems with GitHub-hosted Actions runners.

The validation job remains in_progress but records zero steps. Attempts to download its logs return HTTP 404 with the error BlobNotFound.

This has happened on both ubuntu-latest and ubuntu-22.04. The parallel Apache COOP job completes successfully.

Affected runs:

38468325479
Job: 115540655393
Runner: ubuntu-latest
Result: Cancelled after no steps or logs appeared.

38469092127
Job: 115543214306
Runner: ubuntu-22.04
Result: Cancelled after no steps or logs appeared.

38470111909
Job: 115546696780
Runner: ubuntu-22.04
Result: No steps or logs available.

I have changed the runner image, cancelled stale runs, changed the concurrency configuration and reduced the browser job timeout to 15 minutes. The validation job problem persists.

Please investigate the hosted-runner initialisation and provisioning logs, and explain why these jobs never execute their first step and have no downloadable logs.

Latest run:
https://github.com/mae-muz/mae-project/actions/runs/38470111909

Thank you.

[github-actions[bot]]

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[R3duardo]

Hi! The timing of your runs matches a GitHub incident from that same day.

According to GitHub Status, on October 13 around 20:42 UTC an infrastructure failure caused delays in displaying logs for Actions workflow runs. That's exactly the symptom you describe: the job page shows no steps, and the log download returns 404 BlobNotFound because the logs hadn't been processed yet. Your post (21:30 UTC) and the run IDs fall right in that window.

Incident: https://www.githubstatus.com/history (look for "[Retroactive] Actions workflow run logs delayed", Oct 13)

GitHub says no logs were lost and processing has caught up, so:

Re-check those run pages now. The steps and logs may already be visible for the runs that weren't cancelled.
Re-run the validation job (Re-run jobs → Re-run failed jobs). It should now start and show its steps normally.
Keep in mind that cancelling a job while its logs were delayed can leave that particular run without downloadable logs, so a fresh run is the cleanest way to confirm.

Sharing the jobs.validation section of your workflow would help narrow it down if it happens again.

If this really helped you. Please mark this as the answer. It really helps me :)

[mae-muz]

Thank You, appreciated