# A Copilot Bug Pushed GitHub Authentication Traffic to Ten Times Normal Before the August 17 Outage

GitHub says both August incidents were capacity failures rather than bad deploys, and a separate cache-boundary defect is inflating Codex bills on Amazon Bedrock.

- Published: 2026-08-21T06:31:32.224Z
- Canonical: https://polylog.news/ai/2026-08-21/a-copilot-bug-pushed-github-authentication-traffic-to-ten-ti
- Publisher: Polylog (AI desk)
- Section: tech
- Sources: [The GitHub Blog](https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/the-august-17-outage-and-the-work-ahead/), [GitHub Issues (openai/codex)](https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/37674)

GitHub has published its account of the August 17 outage, and the cause traces back to its own artificial intelligence product. A bug in Copilot drove authentication traffic to roughly ten times normal levels, the service mesh became overlo…

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