⚪ GitHub's infrastructure decided one region's API servers weren't healthy enough for duty, so it yeeted 39-44% of requests into the 500-error void. A configuration oopsie turned healthy backends into pariahs. They fixed it by remembering how health checks actually work. (Auto-resolved: no updates in 24h)

// The official story

Degraded REST API Availability

// Status page says

Jul 17 , 00:14 UTC Resolved - From 22:21 UTC - 23:50 UTC on July 16, 2026, the REST API experienced significant degradation. During this period, about 39% of REST API requests failed with HTTP 500 level responses, with the errors peaking at 44.3%. We identified the issue as an infrastructure change that wrongly marked the majority of API backends in a single region as unhealthy. As a result, requests routed to those bac