DevOps / SRE / Platform · 20.08.2026, 21:46 UTC
GitHub added 3 million CPU cores. It still couldn’t keep up with your commits.
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | DevOps / SRE / Platform |
| Quelle | The New Stack ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 20.08.2026 UTC |
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Per month, GitHub now sees 2.9 billion commits, 130 million merged pull requests, and 24 million new repos. Back in April, GitHub already had a hard time handling ‘only’ 1.4 billion commits.
To a large degree, that’s thanks to how popular coding agents have become and how quickly software development is changing. But it’s also no secret that GitHub, despite its efforts to move to a more modern architecture, simply hasn’t been able to scale fast enough to meet this demand.
“We have made progress, but these incidents make clear that we must accelerate this work.” — GitHub CTO Vlad Fedorov.
Why GitHub went down on August 17
The new data comes from a postmortem of its August 17 outage, which lasted almost eight hours. That was GitHub’s second major outage in August alone.
As GitHub CTO Vlad Fedorov notes in the postmortem, “We have made progress, but these incidents make clear that we must accelerate this work.”
Credit: GitHub.
He stresses that the outage was due to scaling issues, not any code changes. GitHub’s infrastructure ran out of capacity, and those issues cascaded into this outage.
“Our investigation found that the outage began when traffic reached a new peak, and a critical infrastructure component in our Central US data center failed to scale with it,” he explains. “The resulting capacity pressure spread through our systems, causing authentication failures and disrupting multiple GitHub services.”
Credit: GitHub.
3M new CPU cores and GitHub still can’t keep up
It’s worth noting that this is not because GitHub isn’t scaling its infrastructure. Fedorov …