GitHub blames 8-hour outage on autoscaling fail and VS Code retry storm

GitHub has published its account of this week's nearly eight-hour outage, tracing the developer pain to saturated load balancers, a faulty autoscaling policy, and a "latent retry bug in Visual Studio Code." According to GitHub, problems began at 1328 UTC on August 17 and weren't fully resolved until 2115 UTC – a 7-hour, 47-minute incident that produced elevated errors across Issues, Pull Requests, APIs, Actions, and Copilot. The immediate cause was network saturation on load balancers in t