GitHub experienced disruptions to many of its services on Wednesday evening due to an issue with its database infrastructure.
GitHub suffers database outage
At around 7:00 pm ET, users began reporting problems accessing features like Actions, Pages and Pull Requests on websites like DownDetector. GitHub’s status page first acknowledged reports of degraded availability at 7:11 pm.
For the next 20 minutes, GitHub worked to determine the cause of the outage. At 7:29 pm, the company stated it suspected the impact was due to “a database infrastructure related change” that was being rolled back.
As GitHub worked to undo the problematic changes, services remained impacted. Updates to the status page noted improvements in health but not full recovery.
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It wasn’t until 8:26 pm that GitHub reported having fully rolled back the database changes and mitigated the impact. All services were declared operational again by 8:30 pm.
In total, the outage affected GitHub users for over an hour. While the root cause is still under investigation, it appears a change to the site’s database infrastructure triggered the disruptions.
The outage comes just two weeks after Microsoft 365 services faced hours-long downtime due another infrastructure issue. Dependence on cloud-based services means disruptions can have widespread impact, highlighting the need for reliable operations.
GitHub has yet to provide further details on what went wrong with its database changes and resulted in today’s extended service disruption. Impacted users will be seeking more clarity on the cause to prevent future outages.
