Actions failures to download (401 Unauthorized)

What to do

• Check whether you use GitHub Actions. Check your stack

  Paste a package.json, lockfile, Terraform or a list of domains at down.guide/stack to see every provider you depend on.

• Confirm your retries, queues and scheduled jobs caught up after the 1h 16m it lasted.

  Anything that failed between 2026-03-12 04:46 UTC and 2026-03-12 06:02 UTC may need a replay.

• Subscribe to GitHub's feed to hear about the next one first. RSS feed

  https://down.guide/feed?provider=github works in Slack (/feed subscribe), Discord feed bots and any RSS reader.

Updates from GitHub 4

1. investigatingMar 12, 2026, 4:46 AM UTC

   We are investigating reports of degraded performance for Actions

   provider

2. investigatingMar 12, 2026, 5:40 AM UTC

   We are continuing investigation of reports of degraded performance for Actions and GitHub Apps

   provider

3. monitoringMar 12, 2026, 6:02 AM UTC

   Actions is operating normally.

   provider

4. resolvedMar 12, 2026, 6:02 AM UTC

   On March 12, 2026 between 02:30 and 06:02 UTC some GitHub Apps were unable to mint server to server tokens, resulting in 401 Unauthorized errors. During the outage window, ~1.3% of requests resulted in 401 errors incorrectly. This manifested in GitHub Actions jobs failing to download tarballs, as well as failing to mint fine-grained tokens. During this period, approximately 5% of Actions jobs were impacted The root cause was a failure with the authentication service’s token cache layer, a newly created secondary cache layer backed by Redis – caused by Kubernetes control plane instability, leading to an inability to read certain tokens which resulted in 401 errors. The mitigation was to fallback reads to the primary cache layer backed by mysql. As permanent mitigations, we have made changes to how we deploy redis to not rely on the Kubernetes control plane and maintain service availability during similar failure modes. We also improved alerting to reduce overall impact time from similar failures.

   provider

Corrections

None so far.

Something wrong on this page? Report an error or send us a note. Every fix is listed here.