Incident with Codespaces

Lesson: Engineering teams should adopt best practices for building software at scale and shift security left throughout the developer lifecycle.

What happened

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.

1. Resolved · Apr 16, 18:28 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.