Extended job start delays for larger hosted runners
This summary is created by Generative AI and may differ from the actual content.
Overview
On February 20, 2026, GitHub Larger Hosted Runners experienced job start delays for approximately three hours due to communication failures between backend services in a specific deployment, which hindered automated scaling.
Impact
4.2% of workflows on GitHub Larger Hosted Runners were delayed by an average of 18 minutes; Standard, Mac, and Self-Hosted Runners were unaffected.
Trigger
Communication failures between backend services for one deployment of larger runners.
Detection
The incident was identified through reports of degraded performance for GitHub services and Larger Hosted Runners, leading to an investigation starting at 20:00 UTC.
Resolution
The affected infrastructure was recycled, which enabled the larger runner pools in the affected deployment to successfully scale up and process the queued jobs.
Root Cause
Communication failures between backend services within a specific deployment prevented the automated scaling and provisioning of larger hosted runner capacity.