Security News > 2023 > May > GitHub reveals reason behind last week’s string of outages
GitHub's Chief Security Officer and SVP of Engineering shared more details today on a string of outages that hit the code hosting platform last week.
The second outage, occurring on May 10, impacted the issuance of authentication tokens for GitHub Apps and resulted from high load and inefficient implementation of an API responsible for managing GitHub App permissions.
"On May 10, the database cluster serving GitHub App auth tokens saw a 7x increase in write latency for GitHub App permissions," Hanley explained.
The third GitHub outage experienced by users last week, on May 11, was due to a loss of read replicas after a database cluster serving Git data crashed and triggered an automated failover mechanism.
GitHub will share more detailed information on these outages and what it's doing to address the issues that caused them in its May Availability Report.
GitHub was also affected by multiple outages within a week in March 2022, when the company revealed that the incidents were caused by resource contention issues in the platform's primary database cluster.