GitHub was down for 7 hours 47 minutes on August 17, and the outage was a capacity failure, not a bug
On August 20, 2026, GitHub’s CTO published the post-mortem for the August 17 outage: 7 hours and 47 minutes of downtime caused by an infrastructure component that failed to scale with load, as monthly commits climbed from 1.4 to 2.9 billion since April. The lesson for SRE teams fits in two words: retry budgets.