Hey there!
Summary of this email:
- Why GitHub keeps going down lately
- 🎩 All the things we have published recently
- Latest Café con Codely recap (watch it here)
- The joke of the week
🗞️ News of the week: Why GitHub keeps going down lately
On Monday, GitHub was down for almost 8 hours.
And it is not an isolated case, since it has been chaining incidents for months. The underlying reason is that agentic usage has pushed the load to levels its infrastructure was not prepared for.
In all of 2025, GitHub received around 1 billion commits. In 2026, it is running at 275 million commits per week, so in less than 4 weeks it matches all the commits of 2025. And these are April numbers, so today they are probably even more extreme.
About Monday's outage, GitHub published the incident "postmortem". It was a cascading failure:
- An Istio sidecar hit its concurrency limit and saturated the load balancers in its Central US datacenter. Istio is the tool that manages the traffic between internal services, and the sidecar is its proxy. A process attached to each service that all its requests go through.
- The autoscaling policy monitored the service, but not the sidecar's concurrency limit, so it did not scale when it should have.
- A retry bug in VS Code multiplied Copilot's authentication traffic by 10, making the outage worse with a retry storm.
So when GitHub's services got saturated, VS Code sessions were lost and login stopped working.
What did VS Code do then? Login retries. And when it got an error, it tried again.
All of this meant that, at the very moment GitHub went down, its load increased even more, because everyone with VS Code open was hammering the login system with requests.
An exponential backoff on those retries would have helped a lot. Instead of retrying instantly, each retry waits twice as long as the previous one (1s, 2s, 4s…), giving the service room to recover instead of finishing it off.
The scaling load GitHub is having to handle is not normal at all, and it is perfectly understandable that these kinds of outages happen.
Luckily, even if it does not look like it, in these last 2 months it is getting better, since they are migrating everything to Azure and figuring out how to scale to 10 to 30 times the current volume (insane).
We trust GitHub even though its outages frustrate us, because we understand that its context is not easy at all.
Tomorrow we will be live at 9 CEST discussing this story and many more on Café con Codely. On our YouTube, Twitch and X.
🎩 All the things we have published recently
This August we have shipped a lot of things, so here is a recap:
- Spec-Driven Development with Research, Plan, Implement (RPI) course.
- Free Agent Harness email course.
- Skills to apply RPI.
- Output Style to improve Claude Code's responses (just today they announced their official one, but we believe ours still gives better results).
- TS LSP for Claude Code much faster than the official one.
- YT video explaining what SDD is.
- YT video explaining what RPI is.
We are preparing many more things that we will announce soon.
☕ Café con Codely recap
This is the top 3 of headlines we discussed in the latest Café:
- Grok Bot: SpaceXAI's first product after buying Cursor turns your computer into a mini company. You create agents with roles (sales, expenses, inbox manager) in a Telegram-style chat, and they learn tasks by watching you do them.
- Watermarks in Claude: Anthropic now adds invisible watermarks to the text it generates. It responds to a European Union obligation, and the robust technique hides a statistical pattern in the synonyms that a strip cannot remove.
- AI also multiplies downwards: the 1x engineer becomes 10x, but the 0.5x drops to 0.05x. Whoever lacks the foundations subtracts more than they add, and software architecture matters more today than ever.
You have the full Café recap with links to each story at the moment we discussed it.
Tomorrow we will be live at 9 CEST discussing this week's news on Café con Codely. On our YouTube, Twitch and X. 🙌
And since you've made it to this part of the newsletter, here's the joke of the week, which I know you were waiting for:
We arrested a programmer for writing unreadable code. When we asked if he had anything to declare, he said "no comments". 😂 😂 😂
Cheers!