GitHub database migration errors causing widespread outages

9/10 Critical

GitHub has experienced multiple critical incidents (August 5, 12, and 27) caused by production database migrations. These include ORM column reference issues, search connectivity problems, and Copilot service degradation, each impacting 0.1-75% of traffic and lasting 32-180+ minutes.

GitHubORMDatabase
Category
deploy
Workaround
none
Stage
deploy
Freshness
persistent
Scope
single_lib
Upstream
open
Recurring
Yes
Buyer Type
enterprise
Maintainer
active

Sources

Collection History

Query: “What are the most common pain points with GitHub for developers in 2025?”4/5/2026

The migration aimed to drop an unused column from a table supporting pull request functionality. However, the Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) system still referenced this column, resulting in elevated error rates affecting pushes, webhooks, notifications, and pull requests.

Created: 4/5/2026Updated: 4/5/2026