GitHub, the popular code hosting platform, faced significant service disruptions affecting multiple core functionalities. Users encountered difficulties with pull requests, issue management, and repository access.

The company acknowledged the problem through their status page, identifying the root cause as an issue within their caching infrastructure. Users reported various errors, including timeout messages and the distinctive GitHub “unicorn” error page.

The outage, classified as “major,” impacted thousands of users who experienced problems with:
– Website accessibility
– Server connections
– GitHub Actions
– Repository viewing
– Issue creation and management
– Pull request operations

This incident follows several significant outages in GitHub’s recent history, including:
– A worldwide outage in February 2022
– Four consecutive service disruptions in March 2022 due to database cluster issues
– A three-day service disruption in May 2023 affecting authentication and database connections

The company resolved the issue through a failover of their primary caching host, though users experienced temporary service disruptions during the mitigation process. GitHub confirmed complete service restoration following the failover operation.

Timeline of Resolution:
10:10 EST – Initial signs of recovery observed
10:30 EST – Announcement of failover operation
10:30 EST – Confirmation of service restoration