CTO promises architectural overhaul following second outage of the month
GitHub's handwringing continued this week as CTO Vladimir Fedorov offered more detail about the August 17 outage – while carefully avoiding the word "sorry."The outage lasted 7 hours and 47 minutes and disrupted developers worldwide. Actions, pull requests, issues, Copilot, and APIs were among the services affected as the platform failed to scale with demand. "If you were trying to ship software that day, we let you down," wrote Fedorov.The incident followed another outage involving Actions on August 6. The platform has been wobbly for some time, something it acknowledged in April, but work to address the underlying issues has not kept pace with the relentless rise in traffic.
In April, monthly commits were at 1.4 billion. GitHub says it now handles 2.9 billion commits, 24 million new repositories, and 130 million merged pull requests each month.
Microsoft Azure currently handles approximately 58 percent of GitHub's platform load and half of all Git operations. According to Fedorov, GitHub has accelerated the migration of more workloads to its parent company's cloud. "Our next milestone is an architecture that scales read capacity linearly with the number of readers, enabling unlimited read operations," he stated. "We will roll it out gradually, beginning with the largest monorepos."
