The GitHub Status page is nowhere near close to correct

[billyatroadie]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Other

Discussion Details

We've been experiencing GitHub Actions outages far more frequently than the official GitHub Status page (githubstatus.com) reflects. During these incidents the status page consistently shows all systems operational. This disconnect between reality and reported status is becoming a significant operational problem.

What we're seeing:

• Workflow runs failing to start, hanging indefinitely, or erroring out mid-run
• Deployment pipelines blocked with no indication from GitHub that anything is wrong
• Issues typically resolve on their own within 30 min – a few hours, consistent with upstream incidents rather than anything on our side

Why this matters:

• Engineers waste time debugging what they assume is a local/config issue before realizing GitHub is degraded
• We can't communicate accurate status to our own stakeholders ("GitHub says they're fine, but deploys are stuck")
• Incident response is delayed because the status page is our first check and it gives false reassurance
• Erodes trust in the status page as a signal — if it's green during real outages, what's it actually for?

What would help:

• More granular, real-time status reporting for Actions (queue delays, runner availability, workflow dispatch issues)
• Faster acknowledgement of incidents — ideally within minutes of elevated error rates, not hours
• Historical transparency about incidents that weren't posted at the time

Is anyone else seeing the same pattern? Curious whether others have found reliable alternative signals (community dashboards, Twitter, etc.) for real-time GH Actions health.

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[billyatroadie]

For instance, today there was an outage:

Oct 30, 2026 - 18:32 UTC
Update - All affected services have recovered following mitigation. We continue to investigate root cause.
Oct 30, 2026 - 18:32 UTC
Update - We continue to investigate delays affecting Actions workflows, Pages deployments, and webhook events, along with errors affecting code search and live updates. We have taken mitigation steps. Actions processing and Pages deployments are showing signs of recovery, but impact has not fully resolved. We are monitoring recovery and investigating the underlying cause.
Oct 30, 2026 - 18:06 UTC
Update - Pages is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.
Oct 30, 2026 - 18:00 UTC
Investigating - We are investigating reports of degraded performance for Actions and Webhooks
Oct 30, 2026 - 17:50 UTC

I'm expecting that outage to show in the status page. it hasn't yet.

[christoferpedrosanchezzuzunaga-eng]

Hey @billyatroadie,

Totally understand the frustration. The reason githubstatus.com often shows green during partial outages is that their incident threshold is keyed to global error rates across all tenants (usually requiring widespread platform-level failures before an incident is manually or automatically posted).

If a specific runner pool (like ubuntu-latest in Azure US-East) experiences queuing delays or regional host saturation, global status stays green even if your pipelines are blocked. A good proactive measure is watching the official GitHub Actions runner repo issues or using an internal probe job that triggers a lightweight health check every 15 minutes to alert your team before full deployment windows hit.