The August 17 outage

	The August 17 outage(github.blog)
	628 points by 0xedb 1 day ago \| 732 comments
	tl;dr: GitHub's August 17 outage lasted nearly 8 hours after a critical infrastructure component in its Central US data center failed to scale with peak traffic, causing authentication and service failures worsened by a client-side retry loop in Copilot. Neither this nor the August 6 incident was caused by code changes—both were capacity failures amid commit volume doubling to 2.9B/month since April. GitHub has added 3M CPU cores and 120PB of storage, migrated 58% of platform load to Azure, and is implementing retry limits, better alerting, and isolation of critical systems.
	HN Discussion: ↓Framing the outage as a capacity failure misses the real issue of non-graceful degradation in complex systems •The commit volume growth reflects an unsustainable AI-driven productivity panic in the industry ~GitHub's scaling problems will worsen and force monetization changes, though Microsoft may absorb losses for AI strategy ↑Client-side retry loops are a recurring cause of severe outages and shouldn't be dismissed as mere bugs ↑Appreciation for GitHub's free scale service and defense of their engineering efforts