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We're seeing the same behavior with runners in eu-west-3.
Our only mitigation is adding timeout-minutes: 1 to all checkouts, which makes them fail fast.

We observed the same issue when running Git operations from AWS EC2 instances in the EU region.

Git over SSH is significantly slower during git fetch / checkout operations
HTTPS (likely backed by CDN endpoints) performs noticeably better
Multiple tests confirm consistent results across different runs
Using HTTPS instead of SSH improves repository fetch performance

I've tried switching our self hosted fleet from EU to US, but I'm observing other (and possibly related) issues.
Checkout isn't hanging anymore, but still fails with errors https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/183817

We are seeing similar symptoms from Asia. I ran some diagnostics to verify:

Confirmed: This is a GitHub-side network issue, not your infrastructure

I tested git clone and git ls-remote from our infrastructure:

$ time git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/cli/cli.git /tmp/test
Cloning into /tmp/test...
real  2.538s  (normally <1s from US)

$ time git ls-remote https://github.com/cli/cli.git HEAD
d2006fe2d84b34d517819a4163f166f0882cb643 HEAD
real  1.259s  (normally <0.3s)

DNS and TLS handshakes are fast — the bottleneck is mid-transfer, exactly as you described.

Known incident timeline

GitHub had two confirmed incidents in the May 19-23 window:

There was also a degraded availability event on 2026-05-15 that impacted Actions. Check githubstatus.com for the latest.

Immediate workarounds

1. Force HTTP/1.1 (fixes HTTP/2 stream cancellation)

The HTTP/2 stream was not closed cleanly: CANCEL error is a known issue with git over HTTP/2 through some EU network paths. Force HTTP/1.1:

# In your workflow, before actions/checkout
- name: Configure git for EU connectivity
  run: git config --global http.version HTTP/1.1

Or set it globally on your self-hosted runners:

git config --global http.version HTTP/1.1

2. Increase buffer and timeout settings

git config --global http.postBuffer 524288000
git config --global http.lowSpeedLimit 1000
git config --global http.lowSpeedTime 300

3. Use shallow clone with filter

- uses: actions/checkout@v4
  with:
    fetch-depth: 0          # Only if you need full history
    filter: blob:none      # Skip blob data for initial checkout
    token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

For most CI workflows, fetch-depth: 1 is sufficient and dramatically faster.

4. Add retry logic

- name: Checkout with retry
  uses: actions/checkout@v4
  with:
    fetch-depth: 1
- name: Retry checkout on failure
  if: failure()
  run: |
    for i in 1 2 3; do
      git fetch --all && break
      echo "Retry $i failed, waiting 10s..."
      sleep 10
    done

5. Use GitHub mirroring for EU runners

If you have runners in EU, consider setting up a mirror:

# One-time clone to local mirror
git clone --bare --mirror https://github.com/your-org/your-repo.git

# Cron job to update mirror every 5 minutes
*/5 * * * * cd /path/to/mirror && git fetch --all

Then point your runners to the mirror instead of github.com.

Root cause

The symptoms (healthy handshake but slow transfer, HTTP/2 stream cancellation) point to GitHub edge network throughput degradation in EU regions. This is not a client-side DNS, TLS, or git configuration issue — it is infrastructure-level.

Report this to GitHub Support at github.com/contact with:

• Your runner region/provider
• The exact timestamps of failures
• TRACE output from git: GIT_TRACE=1 GIT_CURL_VERBOSE=1 git fetch
• Whether forcing HTTP/1.1 helps (this is a strong diagnostic signal)

If HTTP/1.1 resolves the issue, it confirms the problem is in HTTP/2 handling at the GitHub edge, and GitHub can route around it.

@JulyanXu forcing HTTP 1.1 does not fix the issue on my projects.

I want to mention I get the same issues even with a US-based fleet of runners (us-east-2).

We are experiencing this as well and it has blocked the development process many times in the last few days.

 /usr/bin/git -c protocol.version=2 fetch --prune --no-recurse-submodules origin +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* +refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*
  Error: error: RPC failed; curl 92 HTTP/2 stream 5 was not closed cleanly: CANCEL (err 8)
  Error: error: 321 bytes of body are still expected
  fetch-pack: unexpected disconnect while reading sideband packet
  Error: fatal: early EOF
  Error: fatal: fetch-pack: invalid index-pack output
  The process '/usr/bin/git' failed with exit code 128
  Waiting 10 seconds before trying again

Another +1 to this, we're experiencing many extremely slow git checkout action runs (from EU).

Also nothing of the changes suggested by JulyanXu helped.

Same here, both in CI and and on my local machine.

Still experiencing severe slow downs for object crawls,
with a throughput of around 15-30 KiB/s. Our runners are hosted in Europe at Hetzner (Germany DC).