The August 17 Outage, and the Work Ahead

2026-08-26

GitHub experienced a 7-hour-and-47-minute outage on August 17 due to record traffic overwhelming a critical Central US infrastructure component, causing authentication failures. Recovery was complicated by a client-side retry loop in Copilot. GitHub plans to implement stricter retry budgets, timeouts, increased capacity, fewer shared dependencies, and continue migrating to Azure.