GitHub retires the macOS 14 runner image on 2 November, and jobs using it fail during eight scheduled windows starting 5 October

A build job that still asks for macOS 14 starts failing tomorrow, and GitHub is doing that on purpose.

GitHub published the retirement notice for its macOS 14 Actions runner image on 1 October. The image is removed on 2 November 2026. Before that date GitHub has scheduled eight windows in which jobs asking for macOS 14 fail, so that teams find out while there is still time to edit their workflow files.

The eight windows all open at 14:00 UTC

The first runs from 5 October at 14:00 UTC, which is 7:00 am Pacific, to 6 October at 00:00 UTC. Seven more follow: 12 to 13 October, 16 to 17 October, 19 to 20 October, 23 to 24 October, 26 to 27 October, 29 to 30 October, and 30 to 31 October. Every window opens at 14:00 UTC and closes at midnight UTC. A job that runs inside a window fails. The same job started outside one keeps working until the image is removed in November.

Three labels stop working, and every replacement is arm64

The retirement covers three runner labels: macos-14, macos-14-large and macos-14-xlarge. GitHub lists four replacements and describes all of them as macOS arm64 labels: macos-latest, which currently points at macos-26, along with macos-15, macos-latest-xlarge, which points at macos-26-xlarge, and macos-15-xlarge.

That matters for any macOS job that exists because it needs an Intel machine. GitHub's list of replacements offers no x86 option, so those jobs need somewhere else to run, and a one word edit to a label will not get them there.

GitHub also says it may reduce macOS 14 runner capacity in the period before the retirement, and that jobs keeping those labels could then wait longer in the queue. A workflow can get slower before it starts failing, and that is the part most teams will notice first without knowing the cause.

The eight windows are a warning system, and they only work if somebody links the failure to the notice. A pull request check that fails at 14:30 UTC on Monday 5 October looks like a test that failed at random to the person who opened the pull request. Nothing in that failure points at a runner image notice published four days earlier, so the first response will be to run the job again, watch it fail again, and start reading logs.

A team that wrote its own workflow files and pins its runner versions on purpose answers this with one search of the repository. The harder case is a workflow file nobody has opened in two years, copied from a template when the project started, still asking for a label that was current in 2024. Those are the jobs that fail on a Monday morning in October with nobody on the team knowing the label is in there. Searching every workflow file for the three retiring labels takes a few minutes today. The same search, run after a release has already stalled, costs an afternoon.

Source

• GitHub Actions: macOS 14 runner image retirement, GitHub Changelog, 1 October 2026