The August 17 outage, and the work ahead

GitHub experienced a 7-hour 47-minute outage on August 17, 2026, caused by a critical infrastructure component in its Central US data center failing to scale when traffic reached a new peak, disrupting services for developers worldwide. This was the second significant incident in August, revealing that despite monthly commits doubling from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion since April, the company failed to scale critical components before demand exceeded capacity. GitHub is addressing the issue through adding 3 million CPU cores and 120 petabytes of storage, accelerating its Azure migration to handle the growth, and improving operational practices and testing procedures.