Outage
GitHub Was Down for 8 Hours. Retries Made It Worse.
DEV Community: backend · By The Unmeshed Team ·
In August, GitHub went down for almost eight hours. It started when one part of its system got overloaded. Then everything that couldn’t connect kept trying again, all at the same moment. All that extra traffic made it even harder for GitHub to recover. In one case, the retries…
The Brief
- GitHub went down for almost eight hours in August, according to a DEV Community article.
- The outage began when one part of GitHub's system became overloaded.
- Clients that could not connect kept retrying at the same moment, adding traffic that slowed GitHub's recovery.
Why it matters
Synchronized retries without backoff can turn a localized overload into a longer outage, which matters for any system that depends on external APIs or services.
Who’s affected
- Developers relying on GitHub availability
- Teams building retry logic for distributed systems
What to do
- Use exponential backoff with jitter for retries so clients do not retry in sync.
- #github
- #outage
- #retries
- #reliability
- #distributed-systems
Timeline
GitHub outage begins, lasting almost eight hours, after one part of its system became overloaded
DEV Community: backend
GitHub Was Down for 8 Hours. Retries Made It Worse.
