Dev · News
GitHub blames seven-hour August 17 outage on capacity limits amid AI-driven traffic surge
GitHub's August 17 outage lasted seven hours and 47 minutes and hit authentication, repositories, pull requests and Copilot.
Next (FR), August 21, 2026
curated by Sönke
CTO Vlad Fedorov's postmortem blames a traffic spike: monthly commits doubled since April to 2.9 billion. A misconfigured Istio sidecar triggered cascading failures. Azure now carries 58 percent of GitHub's load, and a multi-cloud move including AWS is on the table.
Readers’ Forum
No contributions yet — open the debate.
Open the discussion
No account or password needed — just enter your e-mail and we’ll send you a one-time sign-in link. First time here? You’re set up automatically.
Your rating will be applied automatically after you sign in.
Check your inbox
We’ve sent a sign-in link to …. Open it on this device — this tab will sign you in automatically.
Nothing arrived? Check your spam folder — and mark the mail as "Not spam" so it lands in your inbox next time.