GitHub Outage Tracker: 5 Real-Time Monitoring Methods

TL;DR: GitHub's official status page lags 5-15 minutes behind actual outages. Use a combination of githubstatus.com for component details, crowdsourced tools for early warnings, and a GitHub outage tracker like IsDown for automated alerts across your entire dependency stack. Don't rely on a single monitoring method.

When GitHub goes down, everything stops. Your developers can't push code. CI/CD pipelines hang indefinitely. Pull requests pile up. Deployments freeze. And if you're like most engineering teams, you find out about it when your Slack channel explodes with "Is GitHub down for everyone?"

The average GitHub outage could cost teams 2-4 hours of developer productivity. For a 50-person engineering org, that's 100-200 hours of lost work — assuming you catch the outage immediately. Most teams don't.

Here's how to build a GitHub outage tracker that alerts you before your developers notice an issue.

GitHub Outage Reality: Q4 2025 Data

Before diving into monitoring methods, let's look at what you're actually dealing with. We tracked every GitHub incident from October through December 2025:

The Numbers

That's roughly one incident every two days. And with an average resolution time of nearly 3 hours, undetected outages represent significant productivity loss.

Monthly Breakdown

October was particularly rough with 21 incidents, including a 7-hour major outage affecting Actions and Codespaces simultaneously.

Most Affected Components

Not all GitHub services fail equally. Here's what broke most often:

Key insight: GitHub Actions alone experienced 11 incidents totaling over 33 hours of disruption in just three months. If your CI/CD depends on Actions (and it probably does), you need component-specific monitoring.

Method 1: GitHub's Official Status Page (githubstatus.com)

The Baseline: GitHub's official status page should be your first stop, but never your only one.

What It Monitors

GitHub breaks down its services into specific components:

• Git Operations: Core git functionality (push, pull, clone)

• API Requests: REST and GraphQL API availability

• Actions: CI/CD workflow execution

• Webhooks: Event delivery to external services

• Issues, PRs, Projects: Repository management features

• Codespaces: Cloud development environments

• Packages: Container registry and package hosting

• Pages: Static site hosting

• Copilot: AI code completion service

Subscription Options

• Email/SMS: Get notified when incidents are created or resolved

• Webhook: POST updates to your endpoint

• RSS/Atom: Pull updates into your monitoring tools

• Slack: Native integration for incident updates

The Hard Truth: GitHub's status page typically lags 5-15 minutes behind actual issues. By the time an incident appears, your developers have already noticed.

Component-Level Monitoring Matters

Critical Insight: GitHub rarely goes completely down. Usually, specific components fail while others work fine. Your Actions workflows might be dead while git operations work perfectly.

Based on our Q4 2025 data, Actions and Copilot combined accounted for 21 of the 51 incidents (41%). Set up subscriptions for only the components you actually use. If you don't use Codespaces, don't get alerts about it.

Method 2: GitHub Status Twitter/X Account (@githubstatus)

When It Works

• Major incidents: Full outages get tweeted quickly

• Public pressure: High-visibility issues get acknowledged faster

• Context: Often includes workarounds or ETAs not on the status page

Why It Fails

• No automation: You can't pipe tweets into PagerDuty

• Noise ratio: Minor updates clutter major incidents

• Manual monitoring: Someone has to watch Twitter

Best Practice: Follow @githubstatus for context during major incidents, but don't rely on it for alerting.

Method 3: Crowdsourced Detection (Downdetector & Similar)

The Early Warning System: Users complain before vendors admit problems.

How Crowdsourcing Works

• User reports: "I'm having problems" button clicks

• Search spikes: Increased searches for "GitHub down"

• Social mentions: Twitter/Reddit complaint velocity

• Geographic data: Regional outage patterns

The Downdetector Advantage

• Speed: Often 10-20 minutes faster than official updates

• Real user impact: Shows actual disruption, not just monitoring blips

• Regional visibility: Catches geographic-specific issues

The Fatal Flaws

• False positives: One viral tweet can trigger fake outages

• No component detail: Just "GitHub is down"

• No API: Can't integrate with your alerting

• Noise: Every minor hiccup gets reported

Pro-Tip: Use Downdetector for quick "is it just me?" checks, not production monitoring.

Method 4: IsDown.app ( Status Page Aggregator + Early Outage Detection )

The Reality Check: You don't just depend on GitHub. You depend on GitHub + AWS + npm + Docker Hub + Vercel + your CDN + your DNS provider.

Why Aggregators Exist

The Dependency Web: Modern applications have 20-50 external dependencies. Monitoring them individually is impossible.

How IsDown Works as a GitHub Outage Tracker

1. Multi-source monitoring: Combines official status pages, API health checks, and crowdsourced signals

2. Component-level tracking: Know if Actions is down while Git operations work

3. Early detection: Alerts 5-10 minutes before official status updates

4. Unified dashboard: See GitHub alongside all your dependencies

5. Native integrations: Alerts to Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, Incident.io, etc.

The Aggregator Advantage

• Context: See if your CI/CD failure is GitHub Actions or your AWS region

• Correlation: Identify cascading failures across services

• Automation: No manual checking of 20 different status pages

• Historical data: Track vendor reliability over time

Monitor GitHub alongside your entire stack with IsDown — because outages rarely happen in isolation.

Method 5: DIY Monitoring (For the Brave)

The Engineer's Approach: Build your own GitHub outage tracker using their API.

Basic Implementation

...

components = requests.get('https://api.githubstatus.com/api/v2/components.json')
for component in components.json()['components']:
    if component['name'] == 'Actions' and component['status'] != 'operational':
        alert_team(f"GitHub Actions is {component['status']}")

...

Advanced Monitoring

• Health probes: Actually try to push to a test repo

• Performance tracking: Measure API response times

• Webhook testing: Verify your webhooks are firing

• Regional checks: Test from multiple geographic locations

Why DIY Usually Fails

• Maintenance burden: You're now running critical infrastructure

• False positives: Your monitoring can fail too

• Rate limits: GitHub throttles aggressive polling

• Incomplete picture: You're only monitoring GitHub, not your full stack

The Hard Truth: Building monitoring infrastructure for services that aren't your core product is usually a mistake. Use tools built for this purpose.

Quick Comparison: GitHub Outage Tracker Methods

Building Your GitHub Monitoring Strategy

Layer your defenses. No single monitoring method catches everything.

Minimum Viable Monitoring

1. Subscribe to githubstatus.com for components you use

2. Bookmark Downdetector for quick checks

3. Follow @githubstatus for context during incidents

Production-Grade Monitoring

1. Use isdown.app for automated, multi-source monitoring

2. Configure component-specific alerts based on your priority matrix

3. Set up escalation policies (email, Slack, PagerDuty, Datadog, etc)

4. Monitor GitHub alongside your full dependency stack

5. Track historical reliability for vendor management

Conclusion

GitHub outages are inevitable. Your response time doesn't have to be. The difference between a 5-minute and 50-minute detection time could mean thousands of dollars in lost productivity.

Our Q4 2025 data shows 51 incidents across just three months — that's roughly one every two days. With Actions experiencing 11 incidents and Copilot adding another 10, component-level monitoring isn't optional anymore.

Start with GitHub's official status page for component details, use crowdsourced tools for early warnings, but rely on a proper GitHub outage tracker for production monitoring. Your developers will thank you the next time GitHub Actions dies at 3 AM and they get notified before attempting a failed deployment.

Remember: you're not just monitoring GitHub. You're monitoring your entire software delivery pipeline. Choose tools that understand this reality.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often does GitHub actually go down?

Based on our Q4 2025 tracking: 51 incidents in 3 months, averaging 17 per month or roughly one every two days. Of these, 24% were major outages. Full platform outages are rare (1-2 per year), but component-specific issues are constant — Actions alone had 11 incidents totaling 33+ hours of downtime in this period. Most "outages" are actually degraded performance or component-specific issues that won't show up immediately on their status page.

Why do official status pages lag behind actual outages?

Vendors need to verify issues before declaring incidents to avoid false alarms. This verification process typically takes 5-15 minutes: detect anomaly → verify it's not a false positive → determine scope → write incident report → update status page. By then, your users are already complaining.

Should I page engineers for every GitHub component failure?

Absolutely not. Create smart alerting rules based on business impact. Page for Git Operations or Actions failures during business hours. Send Slack notifications for Issues/PR problems. Email for Copilot disruptions. Alert fatigue from non-critical component failures will make your team ignore real emergencies.

How do I monitor GitHub without getting buried in false positives?

Use a monitoring solution that correlates multiple signals. A single failed API call shouldn't trigger an alert, but combine that with user reports, status page updates, and performance degradation? That's a real incident. Tools like IsDown aggregate these signals to reduce noise while maintaining fast detection.