In October 2024, GitHub experienced a major performance issue due to a DNS infrastructure failure. The problem was caused by a database migration at one of the company’s sites. The incident lasted for over 19 hours, affecting services like Copilot and Actions workflows. Copilot users faced degraded IDE code completions, with 4% experiencing issues, while 25% of Actions workflow users encountered delays exceeding five minutes.
Code search requests also failed for about four hours. GitHub’s team managed to implement a remediation plan by deploying temporary DNS resolution capabilities to the affected site. This led to the recovery of DNS resolution and resolution of remaining issues with code search. The company is now focusing on enhancing its resiliency and automation processes to prevent similar incidents in the future.
