On Saturday, August 31, 2013, at 5 AM PDT, GitHub planned to upgrade a significant portion of its database infrastructure to enhance speed and reliability, anticipating the process to take no more than 20 minutes. To minimize risks during this upgrade, the site would enter maintenance mode, rendering HTTP, API, and Git access to GitHub.com temporarily unavailable. Updates on the status of the maintenance were to be provided at its start and conclusion via the status page and the @githubstatus Twitter account, as communicated by Sam Lambert.