GitHub’s 8 Hour Outage Kills your Deployment Window

On August 17, 2026, GitHub went dark for 7 hours and 47 minutes, freezing Issues, Pull Requests, APIs, Actions, and Copilot for developers around the world. GitHub's postmortem blames saturated load balancers in its Central US facility, an autoscaling policy that watched the wrong metric, and a latent retry bug in Visual Studio Code that amplified traffic to a single internal endpoint by roughly 10 times. In this episode we break down what actually broke, why the Copilot Token Service was the last thing to recover, and what it means that competitors like Cursor's new Origin Code Hosting are already circling. Most importantly, we walk SMB owners through the exact steps to take this week so a single vendor outage cannot stop your deployments, your security patches, or your next product launch. Make sure to subscribe to our podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for more technology insights every Friday at 6 PM (PDT), as well as check out our website at www.frostyos.com.