Looks like Azure as a platform just killed the ability for VM scale operations, due to a change on a storage account ACL that hosted VM extensions. Wow... We noticed when github actions went down, then our self hosted runners because we can't scale anymore.

Information

Active - Virtual Machines and dependent services - Service management issues in multiple regions

Impact statement: As early as 19:46 UTC on 2 February 2026, we are aware of an ongoing issue causing customers to receive error notifications when performing service management operations - such as create, delete, update, scaling, start, stop - for Virtual Machines (VMs) across multiple regions. These issues are also causing impact to services with dependencies on these service management operations - including Azure Arc Enabled Servers, Azure Batch, Azure DevOps, Azure Load Testing, and GitHub. For details on the latter, please see https://www.githubstatus.com.

Current status: We have determined that these issues were caused by a recent configuration change that affected public access to certain Microsoft‑managed storage accounts, used to host extension packages. We are actively working on mitigation, including updating configuration to restore relevant access permissions. We have applied this update in one region so far, and are assessing the extent to which this mitigates customer issues. Our next update will be provided by 22:30 UTC, approximately 60 minutes from now.

https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status

Clickable link https://www.githubstatus.com/

( Or if you prefer https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/xwn6hjps36ty )

The real lock-in is stars, not reliability [1].

They can have weekly outages, and the FOSS products would still be forced to be on GitHub.

1 - https://ashishb.net/tech/github-stars/

Not a huge surprise but Azure DevOps, seems to have the same issue. https://status.dev.azure.com/_event/742338411

Wow, first one in a week!

I think they've just stopped caring about the consequences at this point, they know they have enough market dominance and lock-in that they can go down as often as they like.

Besides the frequent outages, GitHub is largely being left to rot because they're distracted by AI. Actions is a security catastrophe. I can't point to a single feature that they've shipped in the past year that pushes the bar.

I've spent hours debugging random intermittent CI failures for nothing then! fml

Is this only GitHub? I noticed other pages and services being extremely slow or erroring more often. Claude errored on file uploads, LinkedIn took 1minute+ to load a simple page.