BREAKING: GitHub Webhooks Down – Immediate Workarounds Inside

GitHub is experiencing a webhooks incident causing partial disruption. Here's what's affected and how to keep shipping.

BREAKING: GitHub Webhooks Incident – What You Need to Know

Status: Investigating | Severity: MINOR | Impact: Partial Disruption

GitHub is currently experiencing an incident affecting webhook delivery. We're tracking this closely and have actionable steps below.

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What's Down and Who's Affected

Webhook delivery is experiencing delays and failures. This impacts:

CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions may receive delayed or missed triggers)

Automated deployments tied to push/PR events

Third-party integrations (Slack notifications, Discord bots, custom automation)

Any service listening for GitHub events via webhooks

Git operations (clone, push, pull) are NOT affected. Your code is safe.

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Immediate Workarounds – Do This Now

1. Manual Trigger Your Pipelines

If you're shipping something critical:

Go to Actions tab → Select workflow → Click Run workflow → Manually trigger

For most indie projects, this buys you 30-60 minutes while GitHub recovers

2. Switch to Polling (Temporary)

If you have a backend service: ```bash

Instead of waiting for webhooks, poll GitHub API every 5 minutes

Hit: GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/commits

Compare against your last known commit SHA

``` This is crude but works for non-time-sensitive deployments.

3. Pause Dependent Services

Disable notifications temporarily in Slack/Discord if they're spamming errors

Turn off integrations that hard-fail without webhook data

Check if your deployment service has a "retry" or "queue" mechanism

4. Update Your Status Page

If you run a service: post that you're aware and investigating. Don't blame users' code.

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How to Check If You're Affected

1. Check GitHub Status: https://www.githubstatus.com/ (official source) 2. Test Your Webhook: - Go to repo Settings → Webhooks → Select your webhook - Look at Recent Deliveries tab - Red ✗ icons = failed deliveries during this window 3. Check GitHub Actions: - Navigate to Actions tab - Look for workflows stuck in *queued* or *pending* state longer than usual (>5 min) 4. Monitor Your Logs: ```bash # Check if your service received webhook pings tail -f /var/log/webhook.log | grep github ```

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Alternative Tools to Consider

If you want redundancy for critical workflows:

Gitea Webhooks (self-hosted alternative)

Gitpod + Custom Polling (event source diversity)

Temporal/Airflow (robust job scheduling, not webhook-dependent)

AWS EventBridge (catch GitHub events via polling, retry natively)

n8n/Zapier (webhook aggregators with built-in retry logic)

For most indie hackers, GitHub Actions polling + manual triggers is sufficient.

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Monitor Recovery

Check these sources every 10 minutes:

1. GitHub Status Page: https://www.githubstatus.com/ (refresh for updates) 2. Your Webhook Recent Deliveries: Watch for green ✓ icons returning 3. GitHub's @githubstatus Twitter: Real-time incident updates 4. Your monitoring: Alert when webhooks start flowing again

Expected timeline: GitHub typically resolves webhook incidents within 1-2 hours. Expect partial recovery first.

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TL;DR

✅ Your code is safe. Git operations work fine. ❌ Webhooks are delayed/failing. 🔧 Manually trigger CI/CD now if you need to ship. 👀 Monitor https://www.githubstatus.com/ for recovery.

Keep shipping. This is temporary.