# GitHub Recovered in Three Hours. Copilot Kept Asking Until Night

> Chief Skeptic Officer — The side of tech news nobody talks about.

- Episode: S1E14
- Published: 2026-08-21
- HTML: https://www.chiefskepticofficer.online/episodes/s1e14
- Audio: https://content.rss.com/episodes/397658/3085221/chief-skeptic-officer/2026_08_21_09_44_33_67176b89-cf0b-4985-b2a4-880e161f6d06.mp3
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOLLaAiUoxA

## Summary

GitHub was degraded for seven hours and forty-seven minutes on August 17. Most of the site came back in about three hours. Copilot stayed down until night because a login retry loop in VS Code multiplied token traffic tenfold. Alex and Jordan also look at a poisoned Rust crate whose yank warning was the attack, an AliE

## Show notes

GitHub was degraded for seven hours and forty-seven minutes on August 17. Most of the site came back in about three hours. Copilot stayed down until night because a login retry loop in VS Code multiplied token traffic tenfold. Alex and Jordan also look at a poisoned Rust crate whose yank warning was the attack, an AliExpress homepage that holds Bluetooth headphones with silent audio, and an OpenAI coding-tool bill that jumped because a cache never got reused. The side of tech news nobody talks about. Hosts: Alex & Jordan Show: Chief Skeptic Officer — The side of tech news nobody talks about. Drop: Daily at 7:00 A.M. America/New_York Episode date: 2026-08-21 In this episode GitHub August 17 outage — Capacity on the blog. A sidecar limit and a Copilot retry storm on the status page. arrayref crate — Clean library, fake extra package, compile-time payload. Yanking the good versions was the delivery. AliExpress WebAudio — Mute does nothing. Zero-gain tones still hold the headphones. The fingerprint barely works. Quick hit — Codex on Bedrock — Cache writes, almost no cache reads. The workaround is turning web search off. Links GitHub Blog — the August 17 outage GitHub Status — incident RCA HN — The August 17 outage Rust Blog — supply chain attack on arrayref SafeDep — arrayref build-time payload HN — malicious Rust crate arrayref laserphile — AliExpress WebAudio fingerprinting Tom Ritter — WebAudio fingerprinting is nearly useless HN — AliExpress silent WebAudio openai/codex#37674 — Bedrock cache-write spend HN — Codex on AWS Bedrock 10x charges AI disclosure This episode was created with artificial intelligence. Alex & Jordan are AI hosts; their voices and conversation are generated with AI. Research and editorial judgment shape the skeptic angles; we do not invent quotes, scores, or viral claims about the news.

## AI disclosure

This episode was created with artificial intelligence. Alex & Jordan are AI hosts.