Holy git! Microsoft code-sharing site suffers downtime, despite move to Azure

Software

GitHub caught off guard by customers actually using the AI being evangelized

GitHub has been struggling with service availability in recent months as traffic on the platform has surged, driven in large part by AI-assisted coding and agentic development workflows. The code-sharing site has been trying to address those issues by expanding capacity and migrating more workloads to Azure infrastructure, but reliability remains uneven.

In the May 2026 GitHub Availability Report, GitHub acknowledges nine incidents that degraded performance, one fewer than its April report.

That's something. But Jakub Oleksy, SVP of software engineering at GitHub, says there's more to be done.

"We are making structural changes that permanently remove failure modes," he said in the report. "We acknowledge that we have work to do, but we’re committed to getting it done and making GitHub reliable when and where you need it."

Microsoft’s code hosting site also briefly halted new Copilot subscriptions to reduce the cost impact of its AI services and to adjust its Copilot pricing to account for shifting model provider policies.

As noted in an April post, GitHub had planned to increase its capacity by 10x back in October 2025, but by February 2026 it had become evident that a 30x expansion would be needed to accommodate the surge of pull requests, commits, and new repos.

Last year, GitHub reportedly handled 1 billion commits for the entire year. Now it receives 1.4 billion commits every month.

“We’re now serving 40 percent of monolith traffic from Azure (up from 8 percent in February), with Git traffic at 30 percent and repository replication at 99 percent,” said Oleksy. “We’ve more than doubled our effective capacity in four months.”

Oleksy notes that efforts to isolate GitHub’s primary database cluster by moving users, authentication, and authorization into separate domains should prevent failures that cascade across the system.

That hasn’t quite solved GitHub’s ongoing availability challenges, in part because Azure has also confronted capacity problems recently. There were nine incidents in May compared to 10 incidents in April. And June is on pace for a similar number.

The Missing GitHub Status Page, an unofficial project to track GitHub service problems, counts 12 incidents in May and reports uptime over the past 90 days at 87.26 percent. By month, the project puts GitHub availability at 78.33 percent in April, 93.86 percent in May, and 88.39 percent for June so far.

GitHub's Official Status Page presents a far more flattering view of availability, with uptime figures mostly around 99.9 percent for the listed services.

These figures depend upon what gets counted and the duration of the disruption. GitHub’s own incident history page cites 26 incidents in April, 23 in May, and 12 to date in June.  ®