Let’s block traffic on the internet blindly just in case someone is looking at an adult website.
585 karma · joined August 17, 2014
Let’s block traffic on the internet blindly just in case someone is looking at an adult website.
At a minimum you can respect their guardrails of a project they maintain.
We need to stop empowering the idea that these incidents are unavoidable. This was a choice to not airgap them safely. Putting open ended models out on the live internet at their scale is dangerous and irresponsible.
> The researchers said public server logs indicated much of the activity originated from Microsoft Azure infrastructure, which OpenAI sometimes uses. They also observed repeated visits to the site by OpenAI employees after the episode, a pattern they said strongly suggested the agents and the company were linked.
So someone at OpenAI likely knew this was happening. Even better.
We need to stop pretending that these incidents are unavoidable. This was a choice.
At least it should be required for critical level services in production.
Aug 17, 21:15 UTC Resolved - On August 17, 2026, from 13:28–21:15 UTC (7h 47m),
GitHub.com experienced elevated errors and latency across Issues, Pull Requests, APIs, Actions, and Copilot. At peak, web/API error rates were approximately 20%, while archive and raw-content downloads reached approximately 50%. SAML/OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync were also affected, as well as Actions workflows in GHEC with Data Residency that depend on public workflow step definitions hosted on GitHub.com. Most services recovered by 16:36 UTC as our Central US datacenter recovered; Actions was degraded until approximately 18:03 UTC; and Copilot Token Service fully recovered by 21:02.
Some of the failing traffic was moved from Central US to Northern Virginia where it was served successfully until the network failure in Central US was debugged and resolved. Delayed replies to a single internal endpoint triggered a latent retry bug in VS Code that amplified traffic by approximately 10x and caused delayed recovery for the Copilot Token Service.
The immediate cause of the failure was network saturation on load balancers in Central US due to a new peak in traffic. Originally this was caused by an Istio sidecar pod reaching its concurrency limits and failing to auto scale correctly because of a misconfigured policy that watched host service but not sidecar limits. One failure cascaded to more and eventually four HAProxy nodes exhausted their flow limits, degrading the gateway auth path and causing widespread authentication latency and failures. The problem was worsened by optimistic retry logic which overloaded internal load balancers. Pausing HAProxy on those nodes simultaneously produced immediate broad recovery. The retry storm in Northern VA was fixed by 1) temporarily reducing gateway retry logic with a PR and 2) blocking inbound Copilot Token Service token requests at the load balancers with a 403, and then gradually ramping back up traffic per-site to allow callers to succeed. Residual Copilot authentication failures continued because client retry behavior amplified load: a failed token operation could generate many extra requests and enter a retry loop. Copilot Token Service traffic increased from a normal 7–9K RPS to 70–100K RPS. Reducing gateway authentication retries and blocking retry-triggering responses stabilized Copilot Token Service and completed recovery.
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.
So basically bad code pushes that caused request amplification and then huge gaps in operational scaling and reliability standards. Oof.
I would argue that it's negligence and that's aside from the fact that if a human did this there would actually be repercussions.
Unless you enjoy that sort of thing.
For all of you people who think these LLM models are “earth shattering” how the hell do you reconcile that it’s a net positive for anyone but those who want to consolidate knowledge and power.
We are really looking at idiocracy in the making.
EDIT: Now it's off the main page, because of course it is.
Actually the last 4-5 outages from Github, Our Azure environments have issues (that they rarely post on the status page) and lo and behold I'll notice that Github is also having the same problem.
I can only assume most of this is from the Azure migration path. Such an abysmal platform to be on. I loathe it.
Looks like there's an internal service health bulletin:
Impact Statement: Starting at 19:53 UTC on 31 Mar 2026, some customers using the Key Vault service in the East US region may experience issues accessing Key Vaults. This may directly impact performing operations on the control plane or data plane for Key Vault or for supported scenarios where Key Vault is integrated with other Azure services.
Honestly all of the key vault functions are offline for us in that region. Just another day in paradise.
Also the fact that the azure status page remains green is normal. Just assume it's statically green unless enough people notice.