Why GitHub’s 8‑Hour Outage Stemmed from Auto‑Scaling Failure and a VS Code Retry Storm
GitHub’s nearly eight‑hour outage was caused by a saturated load balancer in its US‑central data center, a mis‑configured auto‑scaling policy that ignored Istio sidecar concurrency limits, and an optimistic retry loop in VS Code that amplified traffic tenfold, prompting emergency mitigations and a staggered recovery.
