Recent Breaking Change? on: push: branches: [] recently stopped working

[janstaelensskyline]

Why are you starting this discussion?

Bug

What GitHub Actions topic or product is this about?

Actions Runner

Discussion Details

Issue Summary
We manage several thousand repositories that were created using templates with the following workflow trigger configuration:

on:
  push:
    branches: []
    tags:
      - "[0-9]+.[0-9]+.[0-9]+"
      - "[0-9]+.[0-9]+.[0-9]+-**"
  workflow_dispatch:

For the past few years, this setup has triggered workflows on all branch pushes, as expected. However, very recently, this behavior changed—pushes to branches no longer trigger the workflow at all.

Impact
This affects a large number of repositories, and the branches: [] configuration is present in every repo and branch directly (not through a reusable workflow). Updating this across all of them would require significant effort.

Question
Was this an intentional change in behavior, and if so, is there any way to revert it or opt out? If it's a bug, can it be confirmed and resolved?

Edit:

After further investigation, we’ve noticed that some of our repositories with similar setups are still working, while others are not. We're actively trying to identify what differentiates them, but haven’t found a consistent pattern yet.

The issue appears in both private and public repositories. Some very old repositories have suddenly stopped triggering, while others continue to function as expected. Interestingly, in a repository we created just yesterday, a push did not trigger the workflow for a branch. And continues not to work today.

All repositories still trigger for a tag.

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[FilipDjuric]

Hello everyone,

I am working on a repository that is affected by the same behaviour Jan mentioned above.

Up until Tuesday 29th of July everything was working fine (workflows were triggered by the pushes on the master branch) but after that it stopped working.

I want to make clear that I haven't touched the setup in any way (renamed the branch, changed the YAML file or disabled the action in the settings).