GitHub went down again this morning. Starting around 9:40am Eastern, pull requests, issues, Actions, webhooks, and API requests all started throwing errors, with Copilot degrading shortly after. By afternoon GitHub had most services back to operational, though Copilot was still listed as a major outage as of this writing. If you've noticed GitHub feeling shakier than usual lately, you're not imagining it — this is at least the third notable incident there in under two weeks.
What makes today's outage worth writing about isn't the outage itself — every platform has bad days. It's that GitHub has been logging an unusually high number of these incidents throughout 2026, and the company has said why: the volume of traffic from AI coding agents has grown far faster than its infrastructure team planned for. GitHub's own leadership has acknowledged publicly that rapid load growth from automated tools, combined with parts of the system that weren't built to isolate failures, has let local problems cascade into bigger ones. Microsoft's response has reportedly included renting capacity from AWS — a competitor's cloud — just to keep up, while GitHub's underlying architecture gets rebuilt.
In other words, this isn't really a "GitHub is broken" story. It's a "the tools everyone builds on are straining under AI-driven load, and even a company the size of Microsoft is scrambling to keep pace" story.
Most small businesses don't think of GitHub as critical infrastructure, but if you or a contractor manages your website's code, runs automated deployments, or uses AI coding tools tied into a GitHub repo, an outage there can quietly stall real work.
None of this means avoid these tools — they're still worth using. It just means treating "everything runs through one platform" as a real dependency to plan around, not something to notice for the first time when it goes down.
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