Update, 23rd October 2018: As of Monday at 23:00 UTC, all the GitHub services returned back to normal. The GitHub team posted an update on their blog mentioning, “we take reliability very seriously and sincerely apologize for this disruption. Millions of people and businesses depend on GitHub, and we know that our community feels the effects of our availability issues acutely. We are conducting a thorough and transparent root cause analysis and mitigation plan, which will be published in the coming days”.
Github is facing issues due to a failure in its data storage system which left the site broken for a complete day. The outage started at about 23:00 UTC on Sunday. GitHub engineers are working on fixing this issue and the GitHub team tweeted out about 2 hours ago saying:
We are continuing work to repair a data storage system for https://t.co/IEoI8IWMw9. You may see inconsistent results during this process.
— GitHub Status (@githubstatus) October 22, 2018
What’s confusing about this outage is that there’s no obvious way to tell the site is down as the website’s backend git services are still up and running. However, users are facing a range of issues such as not being able to log in, outdated files being served, branches missing, unable to submit Gists, bug reports, posts, etc.
The team updated their status to “We continue working to repair a data storage system for GitHub.com. You may see inconsistent results during this process”.
The GitHub team further updated the users, “During this time, information displayed on GitHub.com is likely to appear out of date; however no data was lost. Once service is fully restored, everything should appear as expected. Further, this incident only impacted website metadata stored in our MySQL databases, such as issues and pull requests. Git repository data remains unaffected and has been available throughout the incident”. The team also mentioned that it will continue to update the users and will provide an estimated time to resolution via their status page.
GitHub is a very popular web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. It is used extensively by software engineers, developers and open source projects all around the world. Since a major chunk of people’s daily work depends on GitHub, developers are venting their frustration over social media sites.
GitHub isn't quite down, but it's definitely staggering.
Spent 5 minutes trying to figure out why a push wasn't showing up in the web view (Had I pushed to the wrong place?). Eventually gave up & posted a comment, but got an error.
Yet email notifications came through for both! https://t.co/THJPtt9E1G
— Amelia Bellamy-Royds (@AmeliasBrain) October 21, 2018
Doesn't feel like we'll be up anytime soon, good luck GitHub engineers! May the coffee be plentiful ☕️ #github #githubdown #ohnoourrepos pic.twitter.com/uPHqQYrZSa
— Michael Ansaldi (@michaelansaldi) October 22, 2018
@github should really be transparent and put a big status message at the top of each page, rather than let everyone find out the hard way that it's currently broken. #GithubDown
— Ivan K (@sajaraki) October 22, 2018
GitHub is also used by major corporates such as Twitter, Yelp, Adobe and others to host their open source projects. There haven’t been any further updates from the GitHub team and we can only wait to know the real problem behind the outage.
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