GitHub now sees 2.9 billion commits a month — and it can’t keep up
The New Stack Frederic Lardinois
GitHub says it’s now handling 2.9 billion commits a month and still buckles. Its August 17 outage lasted almost eight hours, and rivals are already circling.
Based on reporting by The New Stack, Frederic Lardinois — read the original for the full story.
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GitHub’s scale problem keeps getting louder. The company now says it sees 2.9 billion commits a month, along with 130 million merged pull requests and 24 million new repos. That is a lot of motion for a platform that, back in April, was already struggling to cope with 1.4 billion commits a month.
The latest numbers come from GitHub’s postmortem of its August 17 outage, which dragged on for almost eight hours. It was the second major outage GitHub suffered in August. CTO Vlad Fedorov said the failure came from capacity, not from a code change. Traffic hit a new peak, a critical infrastructure component in GitHub’s Central US data center failed to scale, and the pressure rippled outward into authentication failures and other service disruptions.
GitHub is not standing still, though it still sounds like a company playing catch-up with its own traffic. Fedorov said 58% of platform load is now served by Azure, up from 12% in May, and that half of all Git operations now run there too. The team also added 3 million CPU cores this year and 120 petabytes of high-speed storage. Even so, GitHub’s own data center is maxed out.
That is the uncomfortable part. GitHub says it has been pushing harder on safer rollouts, better testing, more observability, stronger alerting, and fewer shared dependencies between critical systems. For the immediate future, it is also tightening retry limits and timeouts to avoid retry storms and cascading load. But the bigger story is simpler: GitHub is still the center of a huge chunk of software development, and its stumbles are creating room for challengers.
And those challengers are already moving. Entire, founded by former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, is betting on a distributed system for agent-driven development. Cursor is pushing Origin into the same space. When the default tool keeps going dark, alternatives stop looking theoretical very quickly.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when a platform becomes infrastructure and then acts surprised by infrastructure problems. GitHub can ship all the migration plans it wants, but if the basics keep falling over, competitors don’t need to be better — just awake. The open-source world has spent years treating GitHub like gravity; outages like this are a reminder that gravity can be switched off.
Read more about this at: The New Stack