If you're trying (and failing) to access GitHub Monday morning, you aren't alone. According to Downdetector, the hosting provider has over 15,000 user reports indicating issues or downtime with the serviceāup from roughly 3,000 reports when I first published this article. Whether you're a developer trying to update your repository, or you're a user trying to access one, GitHub may give you trouble.
GitHub officially confirmed the outage through multiple updates to its status page. The latest update was issued at 11:16 a.m. ET, and reads: "We are experiencing high error rates around 20% for web experiences and api traffic. Archive downloads and raw repository content downloads are experiencing an approximate 50% error rate. SAML and OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync are also impacted. We are still working to identify the root cause and will continue to post updates as we learn more and perform mitigation."
If the comments on Downdetector are any indication, this is not the first time GitHub has had service issues. One comment reads: "Cmon [GitHub] get your sh*t together…this is getting old." (The user added their own asterisks.) Scrolling through the comment history, users reported errors one or twice a week throughout August. I'm not a regular GitHub user, so I can't attest personally to repeated downtimes, but it does seem as though this isn't wholly unusual.
As such, chances are good that the company will get the site up and running sooner rather than later. Assuming the aforementioned root cause is nothing catastrophic, developers and users alike should be able to access the site sometime today. That said, I will continue to update this piece if GitHub's downtime extends longer than normal.
