GitHub Availability Report: October 2024

In October 2024, GitHub experienced a significant service disruption due to a failure in the DNS infrastructure following a database migration, impacting various services for nearly 19 hours. The incident began on October 11, when DNS lookups failed to resolve at one site, leading to cascading failures and broad customer impact, including 4% of Copilot users experiencing degradation and 25% of Actions workflow users facing delays, while code search requests failed entirely for about four hours. Initial attempts to mitigate the situation by redirecting DNS traffic were unsuccessful, leading to further connectivity issues. A more effective remediation plan was implemented later in the day, deploying temporary DNS solutions and restoring site functionality by 22:16 UTC, with remaining issues resolved by 01:11 UTC on October 12. GitHub is working to enhance its resiliency and automation processes to improve future incident response times and encourages users to follow their status page and engineering blog for updates.