[2026-03-16] Incident Thread

[github-actions[bot]]

❗ An incident has been declared:

Disruption with some GitHub services

Subscribe to this Discussion for updates on this incident. Please upvote or emoji react instead of commenting +1 on the Discussion to avoid overwhelming the thread. Any account guidance specific to this incident will be shared in thread and on the Incident Status Page.

[A181-CODER]

Hi 👋

Since this is an Incident Thread posted by the GitHub bot, it represents a platform disruption or degraded service rather than a standard user‑asked question.

GitHub now publishes official incident updates directly in Community Discussions so users can track outages, post their own experiences, and see status updates in real‑time. ([The GitHub Blog]1)

How to approach this thread:

1. Check the incident updates from the bot — the bot will typically add comments as the situation evolves.
2. Share your experience if you’re affected — e.g., whether issues, pull requests, Codespaces, Actions, or Copilot features are failing for you.
3. Avoid speculative troubleshooting early — since incidents are generally caused by backend issues, local fixes rarely apply until GitHub acknowledges a resolution.
4. Follow the incident progression — often the bot will mark the incident as resolved once the underlying service issue is fixed.
5. Report if your issue differs — if your experience doesn’t match the incident pattern, you can comment with logs or error messages.

If you have specifics like errors, timestamps, or the feature that’s broken (Issues / Codespaces / Actions / Copilot), adding that detail helps other affected users share correlation patterns while the platform team works on resolution.

Hope this helps clarify what this type of thread represents.

[github-actions[bot]]

Update

We are investigating reports of users experiencing errors when starting or connecting to Codespaces. Some users may be unable to access their development environments during this time. We are working to identify the root cause and will implement a fix as soon as possible.

[A181-CODER]

Thanks for the update!

It looks like this incident is related to a broader transient issue affecting GitHub Codespaces availability — GitHub Status shows that on March 9, 2026, Codespaces creation and connection requests experienced elevated failure rates (some regions saw nearly 100% failure) due to degraded network connectivity between control plane services and the VMs hosting Codespaces. Traffic was redirected to alternate infrastructure and normal service has since been restored. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}

Historically, Codespaces has had a few similar incidents where network routing, regional infrastructure, or backend provisioning services caused degraded performance or failed starts. These have been resolved once the underlying infrastructure issues were mitigated and traffic failovers occurred. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}

For users:

1. If you are still seeing errors when starting or connecting, trying a different region (via Codespaces region preferences) sometimes helps while infrastructure recovers.
2. Confirm your billing/quota isn’t preventing start operations (especially with free or org plans).
3. If your Codespace is stuck, a rebuild or recreation usually works once backend incidents are resolved.
4. If the issue persists beyond the incident timeframe, capturing any error logs (e.g., 503, timeouts, network errors) can help support correlate it with ongoing backend effects.

Good to see this being tracked here — hopefully a detailed root cause analysis is shared soon by GitHub.

[github-actions[bot]]

Update

Errors starting or resuming Codespaces have resolved.

[github-actions[bot]]

Incident Resolved

This incident has been resolved.

[github-actions[bot]]

Incident Summary

On 16 March 2026, between 14:16 UTC and 15:18 UTC, Codespaces users encountered a download failure error message when starting newly created or resumed codespaces. At peak, 96% of the created or resumed codespaces were impacted. Active codespaces with a running VSCode environment were not affected.

The error was a result of an API deployment issue with our VS Code remote experience dependency and was resolved by rolling back that deployment. We are working with our partners to reduce our incident engagement time, improve early detection before they impact our customers, and ensure safe rollout of similar changes in the future.