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GitHub Spark Outage: Community Insights on a Critical Service Interruption

A recent discussion on GitHub's community forum illuminated a critical service interruption impacting users of GitHub Spark, the AI-powered prototyping tool. On February 7th, 2026, user arnaudjund reported a "black screen" and "Looks like something went wrong" message when attempting to use Spark, despite having a GitHub Copilot Pro+ license. This initial report quickly escalated into a widespread community concern, highlighting the reliance developers place on such tools and the challenges of diagnosing issues when official status pages remain silent.

Developer frustrated by a black screen error on GitHub Spark
Developer frustrated by a black screen error on GitHub Spark

The Outage Unfolds: Community Diagnoses a Silent Problem

The original post triggered a rapid influx of "same issue" reports from developers across various browsers (Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Safari) and operating systems (Mac). Users like elias6720, lnwu, and orlandobatistac confirmed the problem, with many expressing frustration over the inability to access or create Spark projects, especially for a paid service. The error message "Looks like something went wrong" was generic, offering little clue about the root cause.

Initially, the community explored client-side troubleshooting. Janiith07 provided an early, astute analysis, suggesting it was likely a "server-side or UI rendering error in the Spark interface itself," not a browser-specific problem. This was further supported by ToxiKejtor, who observed a more specific error in the network tab: "Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'canEdit')". Despite these insights, the official GitHub Status page showed "All Systems Operational," adding to the confusion and leaving users to wonder if the problem was unique to them.

Community-Driven Troubleshooting: A Glimpse into Developer Resilience

Before the official resolution, several community members offered detailed browser-based troubleshooting steps, demonstrating the collective effort to self-diagnose:

  • Browser Cache & Hard Reload: Clearing cached images and files (Ctrl + Shift + R in Edge).
  • Hardware Acceleration: Disabling "Use hardware acceleration when available" in browser settings.
  • Shader Cache: Deleting contents of the GPUCache folder (e.g., %localappdata%\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\ShaderCache).
  • InPrivate/Incognito Mode: Testing for extension conflicts.
  • Sign Out & Sign In: Refreshing the GitHub Copilot session.
  • Alternative Browsers: Checking if the issue was browser-specific.
  • Disable Extensions: Turning off ad-blockers, script blockers, or privacy extensions.
  • Tracking Prevention: Adjusting browser tracking prevention settings (e.g., to "Basic").
  • Developer Tools: Checking Console and Network tabs for 401 or 500 errors, suggesting backend provisioning issues.

While these steps are valuable for general web application troubleshooting, they ultimately proved ineffective for this particular outage, reinforcing the server-side nature of the problem.

Development team collaborating to resolve a service outage
Development team collaborating to resolve a service outage

Resolution and Lessons Learned

The outage persisted through the weekend, causing significant disruption for developers like burnstuff, who had invested "dozens of hours" into prototyping. The community's frustration grew, with some users questioning the lack of immediate support for a paid service and the terms of service for Spark.

Finally, on February 9th, 2026, users reported Spark being back online. Justin McBride from the GitHub Spark team officially confirmed the issue:

👋 Hello from the GitHub Spark team. We're sorry about the outage that was caused, as some changes were shipped over the weekend unintentionally that left Spark inoperable. We identified the issue early on Monday morning and pushed out a fix for it as soon as we could. The fix has been deployed and this particular issue should now be resolved. We're working to address any shortfalls in why this wasn't caught sooner, and ensure that we have better testing in place to prevent similar issues. Thanks for being engaged users!

This incident underscores the importance of transparent communication during service outages and the critical role of community forums in sharing information and offering mutual support. It also highlights the need for robust internal testing and deployment processes, especially for services integrated into a broader platform. For developers, a reliable github monitoring tool for their critical services, combined with active participation in community discussions, can be invaluable during unexpected disruptions.