GitHub experienced a major incident on April 16, 2026 affecting Codespaces, lasting 3h 21m. The incident has been resolved; the full update timeline is below.
Affected components
Update timeline
- investigating Apr 16, 2026, 03:06 PM UTC
We are investigating reports of degraded performance for Codespaces
- investigating Apr 16, 2026, 03:08 PM UTC
We are experiencing degraded performance in Codespaces related to creating a new Codespace or starting an existing Codespace from the VS Code editor. SSH connections to Codespaces are not impacted. We are working toward mitigation and will continue to keep you updated on progress.
- investigating Apr 16, 2026, 03:41 PM UTC
Codespaces is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.
- investigating Apr 16, 2026, 03:49 PM UTC
We found an issue that impacts 70% of Codespaces. We are engaged with the provider and working towards mitigation.
- investigating Apr 16, 2026, 04:37 PM UTC
Our provider is implementing a mitigation and we are seeing signs of recovery.
- monitoring Apr 16, 2026, 06:22 PM UTC
The degradation affecting Codespaces has been mitigated. We are monitoring to ensure stability.
- resolved Apr 16, 2026, 06:28 PM UTC
On April 16, 2026 between 09:30 UTC and 17:15 UTC, users experienced failures when attempting to connect to GitHub Codespaces via the VS Code editor. During this time, approximately 40% of codespace start operations failed. Users connecting via SSH were not impacted. The issue was caused by a failure in an upstream download service that prevented the VS Code Server from being retrieved during codespace startup. The impact was mitigated by implementing a workaround to use an alternative download path when the primary endpoint is degraded. We are working with the upstream dependency to address the root cause of the download service failure, and we are improving our fallback mechanisms to reduce the impact of similar upstream failures in the future.