software-reliability
Latest stories covering software-reliability, with summaries and links to related coverage.
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The August 17 outage, and the work ahead
news
4 min read
GitHub suffered a 7-hour, 47-minute outage on August 17 that disrupted github.com, authentication, GitHub Actions, APIs, pull requests, issues, and Copilot worldwide. GitHub said traffic had reached a new peak when a critical infrastructure component in its Central US data center failed to scale, creating capacity pressure that spread across its systems. Most services recovered that day after teams rerouted traffic and isolated affected infrastructure, while some Copilot services took longer because client-side retry loops increased traffic during recovery. The outage was GitHub’s second significant August incident, following an August 6 GitHub Actions failure. GitHub said neither event resulted from a code or configuration change; both were capacity failures. Monthly commits grew from 1.4 billion in April to 2.9 billion, increasing system demand. Since April, GitHub has added more than 3 million CPU cores, 120 petabytes of high-speed storage, and additional network capacity, while accelerating its migration to Azure. Azure now handles about 58% of GitHub platform load and half of Git operations, up from 12% of platform load in May. GitHub plans to limit retries and apply retry budgets and variable timeouts between services, review lower-priority CPU and memory alerts, isolate critical systems, and remove shared dependencies. It is also developing an architecture intended to scale read capacity linearly for large monorepos.
GitHub and the crime against software
opinion
54 min read
GitHub is currently experiencing downtime, highlighting ongoing issues with its reliability, security, and performance. This situation reflects broader infrastructural decay within GitHub and the larger tech software services sector.
GitHub Is Sinking
opinion
3 min read
GitHub's performance has declined significantly since its acquisition by Microsoft, with users reporting frequent issues and a concerning uptime status. The platform is perceived as less appealing, leading to frustration among regular users.
We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
research
10 min read
A bug was discovered in the Apollo Guidance Computer's gyro control code that has been undetected for fifty-seven years, causing a resource lock that silently disables the guidance platform's ability to realign. The bug was identified using Claude and Allium, an open-source behavioral specification language.