GitHub Actions outage told devs 'your account is suspended'

GitHub Actions, used to build, test, and deploy code, experienced an outage lasting more than three hours. Users reported that CI pipelines were effectively blocked because Actions are embedded in CI/CD workflows and cannot be easily bypassed by local development. An initial incident report described degraded performance for Actions and Pages, later revised to indicate that the majority of Actions runs were impacted due to authentication issues. Some customers using external or self-hosted runners still saw outages because the GitHub cloud service acts as the control plane for runners. Developers also encountered an incorrect error message claiming their account was suspended, increasing stress during the failure.

"GitHub Actions, a service which builds, tests and deploys code, was down for more than three hours yesterday, accompanied by an alarming and incorrect error message that stated that "Your account is suspended." The impact of an outage in the code shack's Actions service can be greater than one that affects access to code repositories, because while developers can continue working with code on their local machine, there is no quick way to avoid Actions embedded in a CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment) workflow."

"The outage was first reported by users at around 1030 UTC on May 26, though the official incident report began at 1057 UTC, describing "degraded performance for Actions and Pages." This description was later revised to state that "the majority of Actions runs is impacted," with the cause attributed to authentication issues. It is possible to configure GitHub Actions to use external or self-hosted runners - the VMs on which Actions execute - but customers with this kind of configuration still experienced an outage as the GitHub cloud service is the control plane for the runners wherever they are located."

""As the person on call for Continuous Integration team in my company, using Github is very stressful. Our CI is currently basically blocked," said one impacted user. Adding to the stress caused by the failure of a critical service was the alarming (though fortunately inaccurate) error message. "My action failed with 'Unexpected error fetching GitHub release for tag refs/heads/master: HttpError: Sorry. Your account was suspended'," reported one developer."

Read at theregister