Another popular online service owned and operated by Microsoft experienced some extended downtime. This time it was the GitHub developer service and code repository service that suffered an outage on Wednesday evening.
Just after 7 pm Eastern time this evening, DownDetector showed that there was a huge spike in GitHub users reporting that the service was not online. GitHub"s own status page posted its first alert at 7:11 pm Eastern time, stating, "We are investigating reports of degraded availability for Actions, Pages and Pull Requests."
Later, at 7:29 pm Eastern time, the GitHub status page offered a possible explanation of the issue, stating, "We are experiencing interruptions in multiple public GitHub services. We suspect the impact is due to a database infrastructure related change that we are working on rolling back."
GitHub"s next update, at 7:45 pm Eastern time, stated, "The database infrastructure change is being rolled back. We are seeing improvements in service health and are monitoring for full recovery."
After that, the GitHub status page showed that the service"s features were starting to go back to normal. At 8:26 pm Eastern time, the status page reported, "We have fully rolled-back the changes to database infrastructure and mitigated the impact. All services are now fully operational." The final message was at 8:30 pm Eastern, where it stated, "This incident has been resolved."
So far there"s been no word on what precisely happened with the change in the GitHub database infrastructure that caused the extended outage.
About two weeks ago, a number of Microsoft 365 services and features went down on July 30 for a number of hours, including Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Intune, and Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Microsoft later said that a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack was the initial cause, the company admitted that an issue with its own DDoS defenses actually "amplified the impact of the attack."