GitHub suffered a 7-hour outage caused by a cascade of infrastructure failures: increased Central US traffic triggered Istio sidecar exhaustion due to misconfigured auto-scaling, while a VS Code Copilot bug caused uncontrolled reconnection attempts that amplified load 10x on internal services. The incident underscores how configuration errors and client-side bugs can compound infrastructure failures—critical learning for SMEs relying on GitHub for CI/CD and development workflows.