标签：#packageupdates

Every time your bot merges a two-hour-old release into main, you are trusting a stranger's freshly published tarball to be the same one everyone else is looking at. Sometimes that release is a real bugfix. Sometimes it is a maintainer who fat-fingered a token, or an attacker who did not, and either way your CI cheerfully rebases against it before anyone had a chance to notice. On 2026-07-14, GitHub added a pause. Not a big one. But a real one. The actual change Dependabot version updates now sit on their hands for three days after a package is published. According to the GitHub Changelog, a release has to have been available on its registry for at least that long before Dependabot will open a version-update pull request against your repository. The cooldown is on by default and requires no configuration. It applies across every ecosystem Dependabot supports on github.com, and GitHub Enterprise Server picks it up in GHES 3.23. Security updates are exempt. If a fix for a known vulnerability lands, Dependabot will still open the PR the moment it can, because a three-day delay on the patch defeats the entire point of shipping the patch. That single carve-out is the whole design. Why three days is doing so much work Three days is not enough time to audit a package. Nobody is pretending otherwise. What three days is enough for is someone else to notice. Most malicious releases that end up on a public registry get pulled quickly once security researchers, downstream maintainers, or the registry's own scanners spot the pattern. The typosquats, the hijacked accounts, the crypto miners buried in a postinstall script: they all rely on being pulled into build automation before the pattern is visible. Dependabot's old default was to be that automation. Its new default is to let the pattern show up first. You can read this change as GitHub quietly admitting that "always up to date" was the wrong marketing promise for a supply-chain tool. The knob, and what shifted about it Cooldo