As software developers got back to work after the weekend today, many found they could not access GitHub. It seems the code repository and hosting website was down for thousands of users. Microsoft-owned GitHub has confirmed the issue and an investigation into the problem.
However, the services are only now recovering and at the time of writing some users are still shut out. At this point, GitHub has been down for several hours for a subset of users.
Those users reported being unable to log in to their accounts earlier on Monday. Others say they could not access integrated development environments (IDEs), which are connected to GitHub. The company has been updating users on its official status page and on Twitter.
Engineers first responded to the outage with a confirmation:
Investigating – We are investigating reports of increased errors and slow page load.
Jun 29, 09:14 UTC
We have identified the source of elevated errors and are working on recovery. https://t.co/lbyPm2wSCh
— GitHub Status (@githubstatus) June 29, 2020
Solving the Problem
Considering GitHub hosts over 100 million repositories over 40 million developers use the service, an outage is problematic. Major companies and some of Microsoft's major rivals, like Google and Amazon, use GitHub.
Half hour after the initial confirmation, the company's engineers said they had identified the issue.
Update – We have identified the source of elevated errors and are working on recovery.
Jun 29, 09:44 UTC
It seems that fix has now been found and is rolling out. In its final message GitHub said services are returning to normal, but some users may still be affected.
Update – Our services are recovering. Jun 29, 11:21 UTC
Microsoft acquired GitHub back in 2018 for $7.5 billion. Despite concerns the company would compromise the open source nature of the platform, GitHub has remained the most popular repository for software developers.
