Is GitHub Actions Down? How to Check and What to Do

Jobs stuck queued or failing for no reason? First rule out a GitHub-side incident, then look at your workflow.

When CI breaks suddenly across every repo, it might not be you. Here is how to check, and how to tell an outage apart from a workflow bug.

Check the status page first

Visit the GitHub status page (githubstatus.com) and look for an active incident on Actions. Org-wide stuck/queued jobs are a classic outage symptom.

Outage vs your bug

• Outage: every repo affected, jobs stuck in queued, no recent change.
• Your bug: only one repo/workflow, started after a change, a specific error in the log.

What to do during an incident

• Avoid mass re-runs that pile up when the queue recovers.
• Pause non-urgent merges until Actions is green.
• Consider runners independent of GitHub-hosted capacity - managed runners run on separate infrastructure, so a GitHub-hosted capacity incident may not affect them.

Key takeaways

• Check githubstatus.com before debugging your workflow.
• Org-wide stuck jobs = likely outage; single-repo errors = your bug.
• Independent managed runners reduce exposure to hosted-capacity incidents.

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