GitHub's 7-hour August outage was caused by record-breaking traffic growth—from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion commits/month (Apr–Aug)—overwhelming Central US datacenter capacity. The company is aggressively scaling hardware (3M CPU cores, 120PB storage added) and migrating to Azure (now 58% moved). Recovery revealed cascading failures due to tightly coupled systems and retry storms. GitHub acknowledges scaling alone is insufficient; architectural decoupling is essential to prevent recurrence.