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Innovation

GitHub hit with multiple back-to-back outages

Microsoft's GitHub development platform has been experiencing multiple outages and service degradations all week. There's been no official word so far on what's happening.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor
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Credit: GitHub status page

Yes, it's extenuating times and circumstances due to more people working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. But over the last three days, GitHub developers worldwide have been hit with service degradations resulting in them being unable to perform basic programming tasks.

On April 21, a number of GitHub services were plagued by problems for at least an hour and a half. On April 22, two back-to-back outages affected numerous developers over at least a two-hour period. And today, April 23, several GitHub services are being impacted by various problems, starting around 13:20 UTC (9:20 a.m. ET) and it's still ongoing as of an hour later.

Update: Today's outage was designated by Microsoft officials as over at 16:01 UTC, nearly three hours after its officially marked start time. Like the other recent outages, no cause was provided and no information about the recovery procedure was made publicly available.

Today's outage is affecting Git Operations; API Requests; Webhooks; Issues, pull requests and projects; GitHub Actions; GitHub Packages; GitHub Pages and more. On the GitHub status site, only Git Operations is listed as having an incident; other services are labeled as "degraded."

While the GitHub status site does provide periodic updates on where Microsoft is at in attempting to remedy various outages, it doesn't provide any details about what's going wrong. On Twitter, several developers have been asking for Microsoft to provide more detailed post-mortems on GitHub issues.

I've asked Microsoft why there have been so many GitHub outages this week. No word back so far.

This morning the GitHub Education account on Twitter acknowledged outages on GitHub Classroom and education.github.com "due to the current github.com outage."

"Ah, the daily GitHub outage," tweeted Mijndert on April 23.

"Github is up to 159 minutes of outages this month... But who's counting," tweeted Alex Atkinson on April 23.

"To all those developers complaining this morning that @github is having another #outage this morning (after one earlier this week)... Consider this as yet another reminder that the #cloud isn't magic... it's just somebody else's computer," tweeted Kellen Murphy on April 23. 

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