Most GitHub incidents are on Wednesday – I analyzed 4.5 years of GH incidents
22 days ago
- GitHub's unplanned incident rate doubled in 2025 and reached nearly 10% in 2026, up from about 3% in previous years.
- The median incident duration increased slightly from 74 to 89 minutes, but the longest incidents grew significantly, with the 95th percentile rising from 5.47 to 9.18 hours.
- Incident exposure varies greatly by weekday, with Wednesday having 6.7 times more incident time than Sunday.
- The share of incidents involving Copilot increased dramatically from 4% to 25%, while Codespaces' share dropped from 28.7% to 5.6%, partly due to product growth.
- Most incidents are short but a few long ones dominate total incident-hours; the longest 1% account for 15.4% of all incident time.
- Reporting practices changed over time, with generic titles like 'Disruption with some GitHub services' and critical labels appearing more frequently after 2024.
- Consecutive incident gaps have shortened, with 62.5% of starts in 2026 coming within 24 hours of the previous one, yet overlapping incidents remain rare (0.21% of time).