GitHub outage using GitHub OAuth causes servers to be logged-out

[choldgraf]

For hubs running GitHub OAuth:

There was a GitHub API outage yesterday, which made servers of running users fail due to refresh token failing.
From a user's perspective, it looked like this:

• They logged in
• Started doing stuff in JupyterLab
• All of a sudden, clicking things became unresponse. The page didn't change, just no more interactivity at all on the page.
• Refreshing the page took you back to the login page.
• Logging back in worked for a time, but broke in the same way a few minutes later

What's going on?

From @yuvipanda :

• I'd imagine that refresh token refresh errors should get logged but otherwise ignored

[manics]

The solution will be slightly more complicated because the refresh can also be used to check a user is still authorised.

[koko3tallah]

A useful boundary here may be to keep authorization semantics and dependency-health semantics separate:

• A completed refresh response that clearly says the user is no longer authorized can revoke the session.
• Timeout, DNS failure, 429, or 5xx should keep an already-running server session alive for a bounded grace window, surface “GitHub unavailable,” and retry. New logins can still fail closed.
• GitHub’s published status can corroborate the availability diagnosis, but it should never authorize a user or turn an ambiguous refresh failure into a logout.

Service scope matters too: at 2026-08-06 15:22 UTC, GitHub’s overall rollup was degraded while the GitHub API service was still reported operational. A provider-wide outage boolean would therefore be too coarse for this path.

I’m Kerolos, founder of OutageDeck. This is the live, official-source-derived GitHub record I used: https://outagedeck.com/providers/github?utm_source=github&utm_medium=issue_comment&utm_campaign=jupyterhub_github_oauth_outage

If useful, I can provide a free, testable failure matrix for this exact OAuth path (status/error → session behavior → user message → retry rule). No account or integration needed.