Projects status changes missing from issue timelines (ProjectV2ItemStatusChangedEvent) since 2026-09-24

[railapex]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Projects

Body

Since about 2026-09-24, most Status changes on a Projects board no longer write a status event to the issue's timeline. That is ProjectV2ItemStatusChangedEvent in GraphQL timelineItems and project_v2_item_status_changed in the REST timeline. These are the events added in the 2025-11-06 changelog. Other timeline events (assigned, closed) still record. The item's Status value and its updatedAt still update, so only the history is lost.

Repro (2026-10-02, new private repo and new user project)

1. 13:39:11Z: create an issue and a user project, then add the issue with gh project item-add.
2. 13:39:17Z to 13:39:19Z: set Status to Todo, then In Progress, then Done (gh project item-edit, which calls updateProjectV2ItemFieldValue). The project's default "Auto-close issue" workflow closes the issue.
3. 13:39:21Z: assign the issue.
4. Read the timeline:

query {
  repository(owner: "OWNER", name: "REPO") {
    issue(number: 1) {
      timelineItems(first: 100) {
        nodes {
          __typename
          ... on AddedToProjectV2Event { createdAt }
          ... on ProjectV2ItemStatusChangedEvent { createdAt previousStatus status }
          ... on AssignedEvent { createdAt }
        }
      }
      projectItems(first: 5) {
        nodes { fieldValueByName(name: "Status") { ... on ProjectV2ItemFieldSingleSelectValue { name updatedAt } } }
      }
    }
  }
}

Expected: AddedToProjectV2Event, three ProjectV2ItemStatusChangedEvents, ClosedEvent and AssignedEvent.

Actual at 13:42Z: only ClosedEvent and AssignedEvent. The Status value reads Done, updatedAt 2026-10-02T13:39:20Z. GET /repos/OWNER/REPO/issues/1/timeline returns only closed and assigned.

Two days later, at 2026-10-04 13:34Z, AddedToProjectV2Event had appeared with its original timestamp (13:39:12Z). The three status events had not. A new move to In Progress at 2026-10-04 13:33:55Z also has no event after several minutes.

When it started (our organization's project, about 150 active issues)

We sampled eight moves a day and compared each Status updatedAt with the timeline. Through 09-23, every sampled move had its event within 2 seconds:

Date	Moves with an event
through 09-23	8 of 8 each day
09-24	5 of 8
09-25	3 of 8
09-26	4 of 8
09-27	1 of 3
09-28	1 of 8
09-29	0 of 8
09-30	0 of 8

Moves made by people stopped recording first; we found none after 09-24. Moves made by github-project-automation[bot] and through the API kept recording until 2026-09-29 05:18Z. On 10-02, 96 of the 146 issues in our two most active columns had been moved on or after 09-24 with no event for that move. A move made through the API at 2026-10-02 12:34Z recorded both of its assignment changes and no status event. A few events have been written since: of 29 issues moved between 2026-10-02 14:00Z and 2026-10-04 12:08Z, 3 have an event for their latest move.

Another public report shows the same decline: nateprich-projects/command-center#1906. That project's status event count per day fell from 87 on 09-23 to 9 on 09-28. The newest event it saw was 2026-09-28T09:57:54Z. The first gaps also fall on the day the 2026-09-23 "Incident across several services" (Projects backlog drained by 2026-09-24 04:55Z) was resolved. That is a timing observation only.

Impact

Anything that measures time in status from the timeline now reads stale history: cycle-time reports, aging dashboards, automation that asks who moved a card. The only workaround we know is the Status value's updatedAt. It gives the time of the latest change only, with no previous status and no actor.

Is this a known regression? Will the events missing since 09-24 be backfilled once it is fixed?

Guidelines

• I have read the above statement and can confirm my post is relevant to the GitHub feature areas Issues and/or Projects.

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