I'm kinda surprised at how bad the OSs deal with this. If you can't get a DNS lookup, would it be so crazy to use the last-known cached value for it?

There's no reason for a computer to not be able to find a site I've been visiting every day for the last year. DNS data should be cached for at least 48 hours -- TTLs should be set to at least this.

I navigated to the IP address for Github, but it still tries to resolve to github.com