GitHub powering up four million extra cores to stop its service going down

GitHub's Universe conference kicked off in San Francisco on Wednesday with news that its infrastructural universe is expanding to address staggering demand from AI agents.

GitHub recorded 7.4 billion code commits in September 2026, five times more than hit its servers a year earlier. This surge in traffic over the past year, the result of developers running AI agents and generating increased amounts of programming code, caught the company unprepared and led to a series of outages and service availability woes.

AI-driven code commits started becoming a problem last December, and led to problems in February, April, August, not to mention the months in between. On May 7, the site's 90-day availability hit a low of about 84 percent, according to reconstructed data from GitHub's status page.

GitHub execs apologized and promised to do better. Those commitments have put four million CPU cores and 160 petabytes of high-speed storage on its infrastructure roadmap, alongside extra compute capacity for GitHub Actions, …