What we're doing about recent outages, says GitHub boss

Detailed summary

GitHub, the largest software developer community on the planet, has had a tough time with a series of outages this year. Here's why, and what the company is doing about it.

GitHub, the largest software developer community on the planet, has had a tough time with a series of outages this year. Here's why, and what the company is doing about it.

GitHub is undisputably the home of open source and enterprise software development by any metric imaginable. By October 2026, the company had recorded 34.3 billion commits, 1.3 billion pull requests, and 2.5 billion open source contributions. It was seeing 30.3 million new repositories every month.

These are huge numbers. "Last year we talked about how 2026 would be the year where developers and all their agents showed up for work on GitHub. They did. We now have 225 million developers on GitHub from every country in the world. In fact, a new developer joined GitHub every second last year, and that's the 2nd year in a row it happened," said Microsoft EVP Jay Parikh. Parikh heads up Microsoft's CoreAI unit, where GitHub sits.

During GitHub Universe last month, Parikh and other GitHub leaders spoke about the tremendous things the company is doing to help developers create code faster, and importantly, verify and validate that code is of high quality and is secure. The company spoke about its new GitHub Copilot app, about Copilot projects that let you run an army of agents doing work for you, about Copilot Fusion which chooses the appropriate model for your task to ensure the most efficient use of tokens, and many other things.

GitHub is not only making it easier for developers to embrace agentic AI, but is doing so itself. "We're shipping improvements faster than ever before," Parikh said.

"Of course to do all this we need a super strong, performant, reliable infrastructure."

And, "this year there were times when we struggled with these things, due to the growth and scale you saw earlier," he said, acknowledging the downtime the platform has suffered over the year.

That growth is reflected in the numbers Parikh stated above, with literally billions upon billions of actions happening.

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