GitHub says August 17 outage lasted nearly eight hours after capacity failures hit core infrastructure and Copilot recovery

GitHub says its August 17 outage disrupted github.com, authentication, Actions, APIs, pull requests, issues, and Copilot for 7 hours and 47 minutes. The company attributed the incident, its second major August disruption, to capacity failures after traffic hit a new peak and a critical Central US infrastructure component failed to scale.

The outage underscores how rapid developer activity growth can strain even mature cloud-scale platforms when core systems are not scaled ahead of demand. GitHub’s focus on adding capacity, improving efficiency, and removing bottlenecks reflects a broader industry shift toward resilience engineering as AI coding tools and automation increase platform load.