GitHub details a 7-hour multi-service outage amplified by Copilot retries
GitHub says an August 17 incident produced elevated errors and latency for 7 hours 47 minutes across APIs, Actions, Copilot, Issues, pull requests, authentication, and raw-content delivery. At peak, web and API errors were about 20% and archive and raw downloads about 50%; retry behavior drove Copilot Token Service traffic from 7–9K to 70–100K requests per second.
Why it matters: One regional scaling failure propagated through developer identity, source access, automation, and agent authentication, while client retries delayed recovery. CI and agent workflows need explicit degraded-mode behavior rather than assuming the control…