By ByteBot
GitHub’s ubuntu-22.04 and ubuntu-22.04-arm hosted runner images enter their deprecation window on September 17 — four days from now. After that date, brownout periods begin: scheduled windows during which GitHub intentionally fails jobs using the deprecated image labels. Full removal lands April 17, 2027, at which point ubuntu-22.04 jobs terminate with a hard error. If your workflows pin ubuntu-22.04 explicitly, migrate now. If you’ve been meaning to do it since the ubuntu-latest switch twenty months ago, this is the last calm window you’ll get.
Brownouts Are Worse Than a Clean Cutover
GitHub’s deprecation playbook — inherited from the ubuntu-20.04 removal in early 2025 — uses brownouts rather than a hard cutover. During brownout windows, jobs using ubuntu-22.04 or ubuntu-22.04-arm fail with an error. Between brownouts, they run fine. The net result: your CI pipeline breaks on a schedule you don’t control, with an error message that doesn’t obviously say “deprecated image.”
Teams that don’t migrate before September 17 will spend months watching builds fail unpredictably, filing confused bug reports, and eventually tracing the failure back to a two-word change in a YAML file. Don’t be that team.
Check Your Exposure in Two Commands
Most teams using ubuntu-latest are already on ubuntu-24.04 — GitHub made that switch in January 2025. If you pinned ubuntu-latest and never touched it, your exposure here is zero. Run this to confirm:
# Find pinned ubuntu-22.04 references
grep -r "ubuntu-22.04" .github/workflows/
# Check arm variant separately
grep -r "ubuntu-22.04-arm" .github/workflows/No output means you’re clean. Any output means you have migrations to make — one per workflow file that references the deprecated label.
The Fix Is One Line Per File
The migration is a straightforward label swap:
# x86-64 workflows
runs-on: ubuntu-24.04 # recommended — explicit and stable
runs-on: ubuntu-latest # also fine — currently maps to 24.04
# ARM64 workflows
runs-on: ubuntu-24.04-armHowever, the 22→24 gap has real package differences that can silently break workflows after the label change:
| Package | Ubuntu 22.04 | Ubuntu 24.04 |
|---|---|---|
| Python (system) | 3.10 | 3.12 |
| Podman | 3.4.4 | 4.9.3 |
| GCC (default) | 11 | 13 |
| OpenSSL | 3.0.x | 3.3.x |
Podman jumped a major version. OpenSSL moved from 3.0 to 3.3 — any workflow that builds native code or uses C extensions and doesn’t pin its own toolchain should be tested on a branch first. Python’s system default shifted from 3.10 to 3.12; if your workflow calls python directly, confirm it handles 3.12 before merging.
The label change is a fifteen-minute job. The package surprises, if you don’t catch them first, can cost days. Run the migrated workflows on a feature branch, confirm they pass, then merge before September 17.
Azure DevOps Users: You’re Also Affected
The runner-images repository serves both GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps. If you run Azure Pipelines with an ubuntu-22.04 pool, the same deprecation timeline applies — brownouts from September 17, full removal April 17, 2027. Update the vmImage references in your pipeline YAML files the same way.
ubuntu-26.04 Is an Option — With Caveats
GitHub launched ubuntu-26.04 (Resolute) in public preview in June 2026, with arm64 support and weekly image updates since August. The appeal: skip directly from 22 to 26. The caveat: public preview means no SLA, no stability guarantees. For production-critical pipelines, ubuntu-24.04 LTS is the right call. For a non-critical workflow where you want to preview what 26.04 looks like, it’s a reasonable experiment.
Act Before September 17
The official deprecation notice in runner-images issue #14254 has the full brownout schedule. Run the grep commands above, swap the image labels, test on a branch, and merge before the brownouts start. The migration itself is trivial — and the alternative is seven months of intermittent CI failures on a schedule GitHub controls, not you.
