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Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →A formatter that commits changes can retrigger its own CI workflow. In Sergey Shinder’s account, two formatters disagreed over a trailing comma: one added it, the other removed it, and each push started another run. The branch kept building because the job wrote to the repository and the formatter outputs did not converge.
What happened in the overnight build loop
Shinder reports that the autoformatting job had worked for five days before the incident. On Wednesday morning, pull-request checks had been queued for about 50 minutes, and the runner pool had been occupied since around 10:30 the previous night. The reported trigger was one pull request containing a file on which the two formatters disagreed about a trailing comma.
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One formatter committed a change; that push started another run. The other formatter reversed the change and pushed again, restarting the cycle. Shinder estimates that the workflow ran roughly 900 times overnight, at about two minutes per run. These are figures from the author’s incident account, not independently audited measurements. Read Shinder’s account on Dev.to.
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The queue made the problem larger than one pull request. According to Shinder, production deployments, pull-request checks, and nightly jobs shared a first-come, first-served runner pool without priority. The runaway formatter therefore delayed unrelated work, including checks that developers needed to get their changes reviewed.
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Why the formatter passes did not stop
A formatter loop requires more than a formatting disagreement: the workflow must write its output back to the repository, that write must cause another run, and subsequent passes must keep changing the files. If formatter A produces a result that formatter B reverses, the repository never reaches a stable state. A check-only job breaks this cycle because it reports the difference without creating another commit.
GitHub’s token behavior is an important qualification. Events caused by the automatically provided GITHUB_TOKEN generally do not trigger new workflow runs, a safeguard against recursion. But the incident account does not identify its credential setup, so it does not establish why these particular pushes triggered runs. A different token or event configuration can affect whether a push starts a workflow. GitHub documents which events trigger workflows.
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What changed to prevent another loop
Make formatting checks read-only
The immediate change in Shinder’s account was to make the job check formatting and fail with a diff instead of committing formatter output. This leaves the correction to a developer or a separate, deliberately controlled process. A failing check makes the disagreement visible without adding a commit that can retrigger the same workflow.
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Cancel overlapping runs within a scoped concurrency group
The report also describes a concurrency group per branch with cancel-in-progress. GitHub Actions concurrency can limit overlapping workflow or job runs; with cancellation enabled, a new run in the same group can cancel an active one. Scope the group to the workflow and branch you intend to serialize or cancel: workflows that share a group name can affect one another. Concurrency limits overlap, but it does not by itself resolve conflicting formatter output or guarantee that a loop will end. See GitHub’s workflow syntax documentation for concurrency.
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Skip runs initiated by the bot account
Shinder says the team added a condition to skip the workflow when its actor was the team’s bot account. This can prevent a bot’s own commit from restarting the job when that is the desired policy. The account does not include the workflow configuration, so the exact condition and event coverage are not established; treat this as a case-specific guard, not a universal substitute for understanding token and trigger behavior.
Alert on unusual run volume
The final reported safeguard was an alert for workflow runs per repository per hour. This can shorten detection time when activity rises sharply, but an alert is useful only if someone can act on it and the threshold fits normal repository activity. Shinder’s account does not specify its threshold or alerting system.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the incident means for CI reliability
Repository-writing automation should be treated as a possible source of its own triggers. Before allowing a formatter job to commit and push, decide whether a check-only result would meet the need, confirm which events and credentials can start another run, and ensure automated changes have a stable outcome. Where cancellation is appropriate, scope concurrency narrowly; add actor exclusions or run-volume alerts as supplementary controls rather than assuming any one guard will prevent every loop.
The shared runner pool also shaped the impact: when deployments and pull-request checks share capacity with no priority, a runaway workflow can delay time-sensitive work. A recovery plan should account for how the team can regain control when that shared capacity is occupied.
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