GitHub's February 9 Incidents: What 'Mitigation' Leaves Out

Tue, 26 May 2026 08:00:00 -0700

GitHub’s availability report for February 2026 covers six incidents and there are two on February 9 worth reviewing. Two windows of degraded service an hour and fourteen minutes apart, and GitHub’s own investigation found they came from the same underlying cause. The first was declared mitigated before the second began. The mitigation GitHub applied was a correct response to what the team could see at the time. It also was not enough to prevent the second incident.

The Medium-Severity Paradox: Where Engineering Time Actually Goes

Sun, 10 May 2026 08:00:00 -0700

The average critical-severity incident in the Revelara corpus takes about 19 hours to resolve. The average medium-severity incident takes about 17 hours. On those two numbers alone, the natural conclusion is that critical incidents are roughly where engineering time goes, and that medium-severity work is the manageable middle. The conclusion is wrong by roughly an order of magnitude, and the data shows why.

The numbers, and how the analysis was run

This analysis pulls from the Revelara public postmortem corpus, which currently spans nearly 3,000 published incidents and grows daily. Two severity-targeted comparisons were run. The “critical” set returned 272 incidents matching body language like SEV1, P0, total outage, and major. The “medium” set returned 284 incidents matching SEV3, P2, degraded, and partial.

Incident-Response on Revelara

GitHub's February 9 Incidents: What 'Mitigation' Leaves Out

The Medium-Severity Paradox: Where Engineering Time Actually Goes

The numbers, and how the analysis was run