February 9, 2026
Unicorns trample your workday
It's not you; GitHub is down again
Unicorn errors, missed fixes, and 'is GitHub worth it' vibes
TLDR: GitHub is having delays and performance trouble, with notifications about 50 minutes behind and many users hitting “Unicorn” error pages. The community mixes jokes with frustration, questioning GitHub’s reliability as urgent fixes and rare “toddler‑free” work windows stall across the coding world.
It’s not you, it’s GitHub — again. The official status page admits notifications are around 50 minutes late and says they’re investigating broader performance issues. But the crowd insists that’s just the tip of the outage iceberg. Developers report “Unicorn” error screens and stuck pull requests (proposed code changes), while one user dropped a separate incident just for PRs to prove it.
The vibe? Equal parts panic and popcorn. Security maintainer mholt groaned that he has a rare toddler‑free two‑hour window to squash a high‑severity bug, only to be stonewalled by a rainbow unicorn. Others are done with excuses. Tapoxi asks whether GitHub is really better than alternatives if the site keeps face‑planting, and showerst ups the stakes, warning repeated outages could be an existential threat — an all‑time own goal for a platform that dominates open source.
Amid the chaos, people spam githubstatus.com and @githubstatus, swap webhook, SMS, and Slack alerts, and trade gallows humor: “Subscribe to delays,” “deploy your patience,” and “the unicorn ate my PR.” It’s the classic outage cocktail — real work blocked, hot takes flowing, and a community wondering whether the world’s coding clubhouse can keep the lights on.
Key Points
- •GitHub reported an incident on Feb 9, 2026, investigating performance issues affecting some services (posted 15:54 UTC).
- •An update at 16:12 UTC stated notification delivery delays of about 50 minutes, with mitigation in progress.
- •Users can subscribe to incident updates via email, SMS, Slack, and webhooks.
- •Additional update channels include the @githubstatus Twitter account and Atom/RSS feeds.
- •The status page is powered by Atlassian Statuspage and links to support resources and policies.