Keep Your Developers Building (Even When GitHub Goes Dark)
Rubrik, Tuesday, August 18th, 2026
Rubrik uses the August 17 GitHub outage to argue teams need a plan for source control being unavailable for a full day.
Around 9:40 AM ET on August 17, 2026, GitHub began investigating degraded performance, and within minutes Pull Requests, Actions, Webhooks and Issues were affected.
GitHub confirmed roughly 20% error rates across web and API traffic, with archive downloads and raw repository content failing closer to 50%.
Thousands of developers reported problems on Downdetector through the morning.
Rubrik uses the incident to ask what a full-day outage would have cost and whether developers could have kept working. The post argues such outages are not one-offs and describes what having an actual answer looks like.