1 week ago

GitHub Blames Seven-Hour Outage on Critical Infrastructure Failure

GitHub, a service that helps people store and manage computer code, had a major outage.

The outage lasted seven hours and 47 minutes on August 17.

A key part of GitHub’s infrastructure could not handle a new peak in traffic.

This created pressure that spread to other parts of the platform.

Users had trouble signing in and using tools such as GitHub Actions, pull requests, issues, APIs, and Copilot.

GitHub said the problem was not caused by a code or configuration change.

The company is adding computer capacity and changing how its systems connect to reduce the chance of another large outage.

It is also moving more of its platform to Microsoft Azure.

Key facts

Outage duration: Seven hours and 47 minutes
Primary failure: A critical infrastructure component did not scale when traffic reached a new peak
Affected services: github.com, authentication, GitHub Actions, APIs, pull requests, issues, and Copilot
Commit growth: Monthly commits increased from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion since April
Recent incidents: GitHub reported two major outages in August, on August 6 and August 17
Azure platform load: Microsoft Azure serves roughly 58% of GitHub’s platform load and half of all Git operations
Added capacity: GitHub said it added more than 3 million CPU cores and 120 petabytes of high-speed storage

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