Suddenly GitHub actions stopped working for a repo. It times out on the very first step of the action saying "Waiting for a runner to pick up this job" the requested labels are self-hosted, windows and we have three self-hosted Action-Runners with the labels self-hosted, Windows and all three show that they are idle. I tried restarting the server that the self-hosted runners are installed on, and double checked to make sure the services are still running, and everything looked fine there. The repo had a successful action run just 8 days ago, and between then and now there were no changes to the GitHub-Action yaml files.
Has anyone else run into similar issues? I'm not sure what else to try since everything looks normal, but the job isn't getting picked up.
I looked in the Event viewer on the server running the self hosted action runners and I found that the runners were stuck in an update loop
Starting Actions Runner listener
û Connected to GitHub
Current runner version: '2.298.2'
Generate and execute update script.
Runner update in progress, do not shutdown runner.
Downloading 2.299.1 runner
Runner update process finished.
An error occurred: Access to the path 'C:\Windows\system32\update.finished' is denied.
Runner listener exit with retryable error, re-launch runner in 5 seconds.
I gave the action runner user account permissions to the file C:\Windows\system32\update.finished and after giving it permissions the file was deleted, but that apparently allowed the update to finish and now the runners are running again as 2.299.1