GitHub, the popular code repository and developer platform, is recovering after dealing with some major issues on Wednesday affecting its website and many GitHub services. The company is rolling back a “database infrastructure change” that it believes was the cause of the issues, according to its status website. GitHub was acquired by Microsoft in 2018.
When we first published this story, navigating to the main GitHub website showed an error message that said “no server is currently available to service your request,” but the website was working again soon after. (The error message also featured an image of an angry unicorn.) GitHub’s report of the incident also lists problems with things like pull requests, GitHub Pages, Copilot, and the GitHub API.
Things seem to have escalated rapidly. GitHub’s first status message was at 7:11PM ET, but in the minutes after, GitHub reported issues with several of its services. The issues appear to have been widespread, with Downdetector showing more than 10,000 user reports of problems and that the problems were reported quite suddenly. At 7:13PM, internet monitoring service NetBlocks also posted that GitHub was “experiencing international outages.”
GitHub didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Update, August 14th: GitHub is recovering after the major outage.