Incident with Pull Requests

Lesson: Engineering teams should document thorough postmortems with explicit failure details when incidents impact pull request workflows.

What happened

On May 6, 2026 between 15:12 and 19:02 UTC creation of new pull request review threads on GitHub.com failed. This included new line comments and file comments on pull requests. Existing PRs and previously created comments were unaffected. This incident was caused by a 32-bit integer key reaching its maximum value in a Vitess lookup table used during PR thread creation. The primary table had been migrated to a 64-bit integer key but the Vitesse lookup table remained 32-bit. Once the values in the primary table passed the available 32-bit ID space in the lookup table, attempts to create new review threads began failing, resulting in near 100% failure rate for new thread creation requests. We mitigated the issue by updating the impacted lookup table definitions across all shards to use 64-bit integer column types, increasing the available ID range and restoring normal operation. Service was fully restored once the schema changes competed globally. To help prevent similar incidents, we are expanding existing monitoring of database columns to include Vitess lookup tables to notify in advance of any tables that is approaching a column size limit. This work is intended to provide earlie

1. Resolved · May 6, 19:04 UTC
   On May 6, 2026 between 15:12 and 19:02 UTC creation of new pull request review threads on GitHub.com failed. This included new line comments and file comments on pull requests. Existing PRs and previously created comments were unaffected. This incident was caused by a 32-bit integer key reaching its maximum value in a Vitess lookup table used during PR thread creation. The primary table had been migrated to a 64-bit integer key but the Vitesse lookup table remained 32-bit. Once the values in the primary table passed the available 32-bit ID space in the lookup table, attempts to create new review threads began failing, resulting in near 100% failure rate for new thread creation requests. We mitigated the issue by updating the impacted lookup table definitions across all shards to use 64-bit integer column types, increasing the available ID range and restoring normal operation. Service was fully restored once the schema changes competed globally. To help prevent similar incidents, we are expanding existing monitoring of database columns to include Vitess lookup tables to notify in advance of any tables that is approaching a column size limit. This work is intended to provide earlier detection of columns approaching size limits before customer impact occurs.