Incident Report: January 28-29, 2026

Railway experienced intermittent authentication failures with GitHub due to exceeding GitHub's OAuth token rate limit, impacting users' ability to log in, connect, and deploy GitHub repositories during peak US business hours. The root cause was identified as the continuous creation of GitHub installation tokens without caching, which was exacerbated by Railway's scaling and increased API usage. Despite immediate efforts to optimize API calls and reduce token usage, the issue persisted due to additional secondary rate limits. The problem was resolved after collaboration with GitHub, implementing cached token usage, switching to installation tokens, and optimizing repository access checks. Railway has now moved to manual repo syncing and improved monitoring to prevent future occurrences, acknowledging that the root cause was their own unsustainable API usage patterns. The issue was fully resolved by January 29, 2026, with no further rate limits triggered.

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