How Client Retry Storms Turned GitHub's August Outage Into a 7-Hour Crisis
GitHub experienced a prolonged outage on August 17 after a Central US component failure triggered a 'thundering herd' effect, where thousands of automated clients simultaneously hammered the recovering authentication system with retry requests. The surge of retries overwhelmed the system just as it was coming back online, repeatedly pushing it back down and extending the incident far beyond its expected recovery window. The outage occurred on an unusually high-traffic day, with GitHub recording 115 million Actions runs and 2.9 billion monthly commits. GitHub's CTO Vlad Fedorov's postmortem highlighted that naive client-side retry logic — lacking exponential backoff, jitter, or circuit breakers — was a key contributing factor. The incident underscores the importance of thoughtful retry configuration on both client and server sides to prevent recovery from becoming a second outage.
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