Security News > 2022 > March > GitHub explains the cause behind the past week's outages
GitHub says recent service outages were caused by resource contention issues in their primary database cluster.
Since last week, GitHub says that there were four service outages caused by these problems, on March 16th, March 17th, March 22nd, and March 23rd. Today, GitHub explained that these outages were caused by "Resource contention" issues with their primary MySQL cluster called 'MySQL1.
"The underlying theme of our issues over the past few weeks has been due to resource contention in our mysql1 cluster, which impacted the performance of a large number of our services and features during periods of peak load," explains a GitHub post about the outages.
GitHub says that there were four service outages that were caused by these problems, ones on March 16th, March 17th, March 22nd, and March 23rd. On March 16th, GitHub saw increased load during peak hours and poorly written queries that caused the maximum connections to fill up and all write operations to the database failed.
"All write operations were unable to function during this outage, including git operations, webhooks, pull requests, API requests, issues, GitHub Packages, GitHub Codespaces, GitHub Actions, and GitHub Pages services," explains the GitHub blog post.
To prevent these types of outages in the future, GitHub states that they are auditing their systems during peak hours and will create performance fixes based on the results.