GitHub's August 17 outage lasted 7 hours 47 minutes; CTO details fixes

The August 17 outage, and the work ahead

GitHub's August 17 outage lasted 7 hours 47 minutes, disrupting github.com, authentication, Actions, APIs, pull requests, issues, and Copilot. CTO Vladimir Fedorov says it was a capacity failure, not a code change, as monthly commits grew from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion since April. GitHub added over 3 million CPU cores and 120 petabytes of storage, with Azure now serving 58% of platform load.