When the Publishing Pipeline Goes Down

GitHub documented a major disruption in its Incident with GitHub Actions.

“New workflows may delay or fail to start, and ongoing runs may fail.”

The outage prevented me from publishing notes to this site for a significant part of the day.

That makes this more than an abstract reliability problem. GitHub Actions is part of my publishing infrastructure. When it is unavailable, finished work can sit ready to publish with no way to reach the live site.

Automating deployments still makes sense, but this is a useful reminder that the automation platform is another dependency. I should maintain a documented manual deployment path for the times the normal pipeline is unavailable.

Read GitHub’s full incident timeline.