GitHub experienced a major outage lasting 7 hours and 47 minutes due to a traffic spike and scaling failure in its Central US data center.

Key Details

• The outage began when traffic reached a new peak and critical infrastructure in GitHub's Central US data center failed to scale.
• Disrupted github.com, authentication, GitHub Actions, APIs, pull requests, issues, and Copilot.
• Errors in Copilot services caused a client-side retry loop that increased traffic during recovery.
• Both the August 17 outage and an earlier August 6 Actions incident were caused by capacity scaling failures rather than code changes.
• Monthly commits grew from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion since April, placing increased pressure on infrastructure.
• GitHub added more than 3 million CPU cores, 120 PB of storage, and increased Azure platform load share to 58%.

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