Extended job start delays for larger hosted runners

Final update

On February 20, 2026, between 17:45 UTC and 20:41 UTC, 4.2% of workflows running on GitHub Larger Hosted Runners were delayed by an average of 18 minutes. Standard, Mac, and Self-Hosted Runners were not impacted. The delays were caused by communication failures between backend services for one deployment of larger runners. Those failures prevented expected automated scaling and provisioning of larger hosted runner capacity within that deployment. This was mitigated when the affected infrastructure was recycled, larger runner pools in the affected deployment successfully scaled up, and queued jobs processed. We are working to improve the time to detect and diagnose this class of failures and improve the performance of recovery mechanisms for this degraded network state. In addition, we have architectural changes underway that will enable other deployments to pick up work in similar situations, so there is no customer impact due to deployment-specific infrastructure issues like this.

1. Resolved · Feb 20, 20:41 UTC
   On February 20, 2026, between 17:45 UTC and 20:41 UTC, 4.2% of workflows running on GitHub Larger Hosted Runners were delayed by an average of 18 minutes. Standard, Mac, and Self-Hosted Runners were not impacted. The delays were caused by communication failures between backend services for one deployment of larger runners. Those failures prevented expected automated scaling and provisioning of larger hosted runner capacity within that deployment. This was mitigated when the affected infrastructure was recycled, larger runner pools in the affected deployment successfully scaled up, and queued jobs processed. We are working to improve the time to detect and diagnose this class of failures and improve the performance of recovery mechanisms for this degraded network state. In addition, we have architectural changes underway that will enable other deployments to pick up work in similar situations, so there is no customer impact due to deployment-specific infrastructure issues like this.