GitHub Closes Out December Without Service Incidents
GitHub reported no incidents causing degraded performance across its services during December. The company's latest availability report instead revisits a November disruption that affected GitHub Packages and GitHub Pages, detailing the root cause and remediation efforts.
November 25: Packages and Pages Outage
On November 25, 2022, at 14:39 UTC, monitoring systems flagged an issue affecting GitHub Packages and GitHub Pages. The Packages team initially marked the service as yellow before escalating to red at 15:06 UTC. The incident lasted one hour and 56 minutes.
During the outage, customers could not access packages from the container, npm, and NuGet registries. RubyGems and Maven registries continued to serve requests. The Packages outage cascaded to GitHub Pages, which could not pull packages, leading to CI build failures. Repository landing pages also experienced timeouts while retrieving package information.
Root Cause and Recovery
GitHub Packages relies on a third-party database for data storage. That provider suffered a regional outage, which degraded Packages performance. The first responder contacted the provider's support team to understand the scope of the regional issue. Before a failover to another region could be executed, the provider mitigated the problem. With the fix in place, GitHub Packages, GitHub Pages, and repository landing pages gradually recovered.
Follow-Up Actions
GitHub's engineering team is evaluating ways to make GitHub Pages and repository landing pages less dependent on GitHub Packages availability. The team is also investigating methods to enable faster, automated failovers in response to regional outages. Customers can monitor real-time status changes on the GitHub status page. Updates on ongoing work are available via the GitHub Engineering Blog.
