(Related Issues Linked) Github Actions Failing After Sudden Billing Error: "account is locked due to a billing issue."

[ahmed33033]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Other

Discussion Details

The Issue

GitHub Actions are failing after a billing issue suddenly surfaced, even after thousands of actions were executed without issue.

The full error message: "The job was not started because your account is locked due to a billing issue."

Related Issues

Many related issues have been reported in the past, but there seems to be an uptick in the last 24 hours.

Here are links to the latest ones:

1. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/212270 (Nov 6)
2. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/212261 (Nov 6)
3. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/212254 (Nov 6)
4. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/212219 (Nov 5)
5. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/212145 (Nov 5)

Here are links to older ones:

1. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/211865
2. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/210874
3. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/210049
4. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/209133
5. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/208297
6. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/201326
7. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/188932
8. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/184077
9. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/167403

---

Further Discussion

Yesterday, Github Actions seems to have encountered an incident, linked here: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/212173

This roughly coincides with when some of the linked actions (and my personal actions) have started failing due to the billing issue.

In addition to the many related issues, it seems many other users are impacted because my personal, CRON scheduled Github Action has been running almost exactly every 30 minutes for now. What's weird about that, you may ask? Cron'ed Github Actions are known not to run exactly on time, seemingly due to the huge uptick in usage load with the surge of GenAI. So, if they're suddenly running exactly on time, this is probably an indication that the load on GitHub Actions suddenly dropped, and I'm assuming that's due to the aforementioned billing issue.

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[Fgaoxing]

@github-staff

[alexreinking]

This is happening in the @halide org, too.

[Neomelt]

same here😭

[SirBlar]

@github-staff if you see this we need help! @Blue-Paladin-Dev is suffering from this too

[Fgaoxing]

It's the weekend, so the staff should be off.

[Yash2048]

Same thing happened to me as well

[heckmon]

Same issue and showing this error in the licensing section.

[Yash2048]

Did you have GitHub pro through the GitHub students developer pack?

[heckmon]

I had a student pack for 4 years and it expired recently.
Maybe because of that.

However, today I re applied for the student subscription again to check whether it solves this issue, with another college ID card.

[misaalanshori]

Have I just experienced the exact same thing? Now that I think of it, the "Pro" badge next to my name is gone, I assume my student Pro plan has gone away. But I thought Github Actions on public repo is completely free? So why has this affected that?

[luckylemonade24]

same issue.

[misaalanshori]

Does adding a payment method fix it? Man, kinda don't wanna add a payment method to GitHub... But might have to just to get this weirdness to stop and get my CI working again...

[misaalanshori]

Filed a ticket with support, hopefully they get this sorted out quickly (for me and everyone affected...)

[ahmed33033]

Thanks for doing so! Hoping we get enough attention for a solution to this issue

[Neomelt]

same here

[misaalanshori]

Hey @ahmed33033
thanks for the detailed report and for linking the related threads. We've flagged this to the relevant teams internally. Are you still seeing the "account is locked due to a billing issue" error? If so, please let us know when it last happened. We'll share any updates here.

[misaalanshori]

Not a global fix I guess? My account is still locked unfortunately