Sadly, people often think that everything needs to be done now and I think forcing less meetings on people helps that happen.
But it's still async... from the perspective of others. I'm not typically deep into the systems-level maintainability on GitHub, but I can check the transcript during or after the downtime happened and can figure out what happened, how the discussion around it went, and how it was dealt with.
Is there something special about Campfire that makes it non-urgent?
So you can use it as a synchronous "have a chat now" tool - or as an asynchronous "leave a message and I'll deal with it when I return" tool at the same time.
Pretty much everybody hangs out in the cat picture room and serious room. The rest are just people interested in that topic.
The ability to have two or three conversations going on simultaneously, share links and log messages, and have a transcript/timeline to use to guide a postmortem is fantastic.