GitHub Actions outage told devs 'your account is suspended'
Jump to main content
Search
REG AD
DevOps
GitHub Actions outage told devs 'your account is suspended'
Another day, another GitHub wobble - but the service keeps growing
Tim Anderson
Tim<br>Anderson
Published<br>wed 27 May 2026 // 12:04 UTC
GitHub Actions, a service which builds, tests and deploys<br>code, was down for more than three hours yesterday, accompanied by an alarming and incorrect error message that stated that "Your account is suspended."<br>The impact of an outage in the code shack's Actions service can be greater than one that affects access to code repositories, because while developers can continue<br>working with code on their local machine, there is no quick way to avoid<br>Actions embedded in a CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment)<br>workflow.
Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto says GitHub ‘no longer a place for serious work’
READ MORE
"As the person on call for Continuous Integration team<br>in my company, using Github is very stressful. Our CI is currently basically<br>blocked," said<br>one impacted user.
REG AD
The outage was first reported by users at around 1030 UTC on May 26, though<br>the official incident<br>report began at 1057 UTC, describing "degraded performance for<br>Actions and Pages."
REG AD
This description was later revised to state that "the<br>majority of Actions runs is impacted,” with the cause attributed to<br>authentication issues.<br>It is possible to configure GitHub Actions to use external<br>or self-hosted runners – the VMs on which Actions execute – but customers with<br>this kind of configuration still experienced an outage as the GitHub cloud<br>service is the control plane for the runners wherever they are located.<br>Adding to the stress caused by the failure of a critical<br>service was the alarming (though fortunately inaccurate) error message. "My<br>action failed with 'Unexpected error fetching GitHub release for tag<br>refs/heads/master: HttpError: Sorry. Your account was suspended'," reported<br>one developer.
Actual account suspension by a cloud service provider can take days to<br>resolve, and involves battling automated systems. In the ensuing discussion another dev<br>remarked that "I recently got my GitHub account suspended for four months.<br>When it was finally reinstated, their support just said it was a 'mistake'."<br>GitHub reliability has been poor this year, sometimes thanks<br>to activity by AI coding and agents, and that of bots grabbing data for LLMs (large language models) to consume, and<br>sometimes for other reasons: it is hard to blame authentication issues on the<br>bots.
MORE CONTEXT
GitHub says internal repos exfiltrated after poisoned VS Code extension attack
TanStack weighs invitation-only pull requests after supply chain attack
Git is unprepared for the AI coding tsunami
Cache-poisoning caper turns TanStack npm packages toxic
Following every major outage there is discussion of GitHub<br>alternatives, with some organizations moving to self-hosted code repositories and/or<br>CI/CD. GitHub is sticky though, partly because of its generous free offer, and<br>partly because of the cost of migrating existing workflows.<br>As one observer on Hacker News noted, GitHub usage is growing,<br>not declining. COO Kyle Daigle<br>reported on X last month that "platform activity is surging.<br>There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace<br>for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.) GitHub<br>Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025,<br>and now 2.1B minutes so far this week."<br>The increased activity is likely related to AI<br>coding generating huge amounts of code at speeds humans cannot match.<br>GitHub reported the issue as resolved at 1318 UTC, although it added that "a small number of Issues, PRs, Comments, and Discussions were marked as hidden. We are working on correcting the underlying records."®
authentication issues<br>outage<br>devops<br>cicd<br>github<br>github actions
REG AD
Science
Swift thinking buys NASA observatory a little more time before re-entry
Rescue mission might have until the end of summer after science operations halted
Security
India's cyber agency sets clock at 12 hours to tackle exploited bugs as AI turns up the heat
CERT-In says internet-facing or critical systems should be patched, mitigated, or cut off within half a day where feasible
THE REGISTER EXPLAINER
Explainer: Edge AI
You can run AI at the edge, if your infrastructure supports it
Personal Tech
Windows 11 update preview promises faster launches, puts Task Manager on NPU patrol
Just mind the known issue that can still send installs rolling back
Systems
EU's digital sovereignty boo-boo may be the best thing to ever happen to the project
DIY or die. Just don't let the CIA buy it
Broadcom gets early start on WiFi 8 with next-gen wireless routing kit
Better, more reliable, and cheaper? Isn't that the story every generation?
MOST POPULAR
Security
America's top cyber-defense agency...