--- title: The August 17 outage, and the work ahead | daily.dev description: GitHub's CTO details the root cause of the August 17 outage that lasted nearly 8 hours, disrupting github.com, authentication, Actions, APIs, pull requests,... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-august-17-outage-and-the-work-ahead-5itrcdatl twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The August 17 outage, and the work ahead | daily.dev og:description: GitHub's CTO details the root cause of the August 17 outage that lasted nearly 8 hours, disrupting github.com, authentication, Actions, APIs, pull requests,... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-august-17-outage-and-the-work-ahead-5itrcdatl og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/5ITRCdaTl.png og:image:alt: The August 17 outage, and the work ahead og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The August 17 outage, and the work ahead **[GitHub Blog](https://daily.dev/sources/ghblog)** · 4 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary GitHub's CTO details the root cause of the August 17 outage that lasted nearly 8 hours, disrupting github.com, authentication, Actions, APIs, pull requests, issues, and Copilot. The failure stemmed from a critical infrastructure component in a Central US data center that failed to scale under a new traffic peak, compounded by a client-side retry loop in Copilot services during recovery. Neither this incident nor the August 6 Actions failure was caused by a code change; both were capacity failures driven by commit volume growing from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion monthly since April. GitHub has added over 3 million CPU cores, 120 petabytes of storage, and shifted 58% of platform load to Azure (up from 12% in May). Going forward, the company is applying consistent retry limits and budgets, reviewing alert thresholds, and isolating critical systems to reduce shared dependencies. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What caused the GitHub outage on August 17 A critical infrastructure component in GitHub's Central US data center failed to scale when traffic reached a new peak, causing capacity pressure that led to authentication failures across multiple services. The outage lasted 7 hours and 47 minutes and affected github.com, authentication, GitHub Actions, APIs, pull requests, issues, and Copilot. Recovery was delayed further by a client-side retry loop in Copilot services that increased traffic during the recovery phase. _daily.dev helps engineers track incident postmortems like this one to inform their own reliability practices._ ### How much of GitHub's platform load runs on Azure now Azure serves roughly 58% of GitHub's platform load and half of all Git operations, up sharply from just 12% of platform load in May. GitHub accelerated this migration alongside adding more than 3 million CPU cores and 120 petabytes of high-speed storage as part of its post-outage reliability push following capacity failures in August. _engineers evaluating cloud migration strategy can follow platform infrastructure shifts like this on daily.dev._ ### How is GitHub preventing retry storms after its 2026 outages GitHub is applying consistent retry limits, retry budgets, and variable timeouts across service-to-service interactions to prevent retry storms and cascading load. This change followed the August 6 and August 17 incidents, in which a client-side retry loop in Copilot services worsened traffic during recovery and delayed restoring service. _teams designing resilient retry logic can compare real-world incident lessons like this on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [GitHub availability report: July 2026](https://daily.dev/posts/github-availability-report-july-2026-jlsbk76s3) · GitHub Blog · 0 upvotes · 1 comments - [What’s gone wrong at GitHub?](https://daily.dev/posts/what-s-gone-wrong-at-github--5f7pmzqel) · LeadDev · 211 upvotes · 19 comments - [GitHub appears to be struggling with one nine availability](https://daily.dev/posts/github-appears-to-be-struggling-with-one-nine-availability-d4tedw2tw) · The Register · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#github](https://daily.dev/tags/github), [#azure](https://daily.dev/tags/azure), [#github-actions](https://daily.dev/tags/github-actions) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-august-17-outage-and-the-work-ahead-5itrcdatl) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"The August 17 outage, and the work ahead","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-august-17-outage-and-the-work-ahead-5itrcdatl","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-august-17-outage-and-the-work-ahead-5itrcdatl"},"datePublished":"2026-08-20T18:39:02.944Z","dateModified":"2026-08-20T21:46:34.459Z","description":"GitHub's CTO details the root cause of the August 17 outage that lasted nearly 8 hours, disrupting github.com, authentication, Actions, APIs, pull requests,...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/7b3dfe0ef364a4d3c2d9bf12c8b073dc?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/7b3dfe0ef364a4d3c2d9bf12c8b073dc?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"GitHub Blog","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"GitHub Blog","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/106cf162b88840808484d4b5429b59b1","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/ghblog"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-august-17-outage-and-the-work-ahead-5itrcdatl","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"github,azure,github-actions","timeRequired":"PT4M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"GitHub Blog","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/ghblog"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"The August 17 outage, and the work ahead"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-august-17-outage-and-the-work-ahead-5itrcdatl#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"What caused the GitHub outage on August 17","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"A critical infrastructure component in GitHub's Central US data center failed to scale when traffic reached a new peak, causing capacity pressure that led to authentication failures across multiple services. 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