AI agents doubled GitHub's traffic. Nineteen slowdowns later, it is rebuilding storage.
GitHub is rebuilding the storage behind its code repositories from scratch, The Register reported on 9 October.
GitHub, owned by Microsoft, is where many companies keep their software code.
The reason is load. Between September 2025 and August 2026, traffic on the platform rose from 218.2 billion events a month to 473.3 billion. In September, commits, the saved changes to code, reached 7.38 billion, five times the figure a year earlier. Much of that now comes from AI agents that write and push code on their own.
The old design kept full copies of each repository on several disks and waited for most of them to confirm every write. GitHub's status history shows 10 incidents that slowed the service in April and nine more in May.
The new design writes each change once to Microsoft's Azure cloud storage, which keeps the copies itself. GitHub says early internal tests show writes 35 times faster, and that developers should notice no change.
A GitHub engineer described the plan in a blog post. It gives no date for the move, and the traffic doubled in a year.
Who in your company sets the limits for coding agents pushing changes to your repositories?
Image: AI-generated.
Sources
For your next steering committee
- 1Ask which AI tools already touch your ERP or finance data, including the ones nobody approved.
- 2Ask what each tool is allowed to change, and who reviews what it changed.
- 3Ask how the result is measured, and who decides to switch a tool off.
Issue 01 of the ERP LEADERS brief puts a timeline, the three-number review and six questions on one page. Read issue 01
Welcome back. · Issue 01
