368: Push, Pull, and Pray: GitHub Outage Strikes

Welcome to episode 368 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and Ryan are in the studio this week, and the major story is the GitHub outage – are you still digging out from that one too? We have MANY thoughts. Plus, we have news from EKS, CloudShell, and some major Microsoft changes to the Copilot ecosystem. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get started! Titles we almost went with this week

Amazon Quick Crashes Microsoft’s Copilot Party Bin-Packing Pods Like a Kubernetes Tetris Champ AWS Agents Go GA and Grab Your Wallet AWS Finally Shows You The Money Trends AWS Hands Out Power (User Access) Like Candy AWS Builds Lofts, Developers Build Everything Else Front Door Now Checks IDs Before Letting Traffic In CloudShell Ditches Vim, Editors Rejoice Everywhere AWS Sign-In Gets a Facelift, Scripts Get Nervous Azure Front Door Gets Mutual TLS, Trust Issues Resolved One Copilot to Rule Work and Play GPT-5.6 Sol Hits Warp Speed With Cerebras OpenAI Ditches Overnight Batches for Ultrafast Gratification Ultrafast API Proves Speed and Smarts Aren’t Rivals Terraform Plans Meet Their IAM Autopilot Match AWS Autopilot Now Reads Your Terraform Tea Leaves

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack channel for more info. Follow Up 01:02 Microsoft confirms GitHub is down worldwide

GitHub confirmed a widespread Github outage starting at 9:40 AM EDT on August 17, 2026, affecting web, API, Actions, Pull Requests, Issues, Webhooks, and authentication services including SAML, OIDC, and SCIM. As of the 11:42 AM EDT update, GitHub has moved into mitigation mode, but error rates remain unchanged at roughly 20% for web and API traffic and approximately 50% for archive and raw repository content downloads. Copilot was added to the list of affected services at 10:31 AM EDT, extending impact beyond core Git functionality into GitHub’s AI coding tools. Git Operations, Packages, Pages, and Codespaces remain listed as operational, indicating the outage is concentrated in specific service areas rather than the entire platform. GitHub has not disclosed a root cause, and the incident remains under investigation, meaning listeners relying on CI/CD workflows through Actions should expect continued disruption until further updates are posted.

Complicating factors that impeded recovery included a number of scraping attacks on codeload endpoints.

To prevent recurrence, our follow-up actions include: Correcting autoscaling policies to account for service-mesh sidecar concurrency and capacity. Auditing Istio request, concurrency, and scaling limits across affected services. Reviewing retry limits and backoff behavior across gateways and clients. Addressing the VS Code retry behavior that amplified Copilot token traffic. Improving load-balancer capacity monitoring and regional failover safeguards.

01:15 Justin – “What’s left? Just call it. It’s all down.” AI Is Going Great – or How ML Makes Money 11:24