GitHub outage, 14 August 2024

GitHub.com fully down after database config change (14 August 2024). The disruption lasted about 36 minutes, according to GitHub’s own timeline.

What happened. An erroneous configuration change rolled out to GitHub.com databases stopped them answering health-check pings from the routing service. The hosts were marked unhealthy, the read-only database endpoint became inaccessible, and the application couldn’t read critical data.

What changes. GitHub added guardrails to its database change management process and is prioritizing faster rollback and more resilience to dependency failures.

Questions

What caused the GitHub outage in August 2024?

An erroneous configuration change rolled out to GitHub.com databases stopped them answering health-check pings from the routing service.

Which services were affected?

All GitHub.com services.

Read how shared dependencies spread a failure in why one cloud outage can break unrelated apps, or browse the outage archive.