In a surprising twist, Microsoft has reportedly turned to its cloud rival, Amazon, for extra computing power after a string of AI-related outages (via Business Insider).
Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018. The company promised to take good care of GitHub, empower developers at every stage of the development cycle, and more. However, recent developments suggest otherwise.
Perhaps more concerningly, GitHub's own blog has detailed how the service has been failing to meet its own service level agreements (SLA). Before he departed from the platform, Ghostty developer Mitchell Hashimoto kept a close eye on every GitHub issue that interfered with his workflow, citing 90.21% uptime, which is way below GitHub's stated SLA of 99.9%.
However, GitHub CCO Kyle Daigle indicated that the company is actively working to address these issues. GitHub used to run on its own data centers, but following Microsoft's acquisition, the company planned to move the service entirely to Azure by 2027.
As AI becomes more prevalent and advanced, more software engineers and programmers are leaning more on the technology to write code faster, which has seemingly contributed to the platform being overwhelmed with new code. Consequently, it has strained the platform's compute resources.
For context, GitHub processed 1 billion commits in 2025. However, COO Kyle Daigle said the platform’s commit records, a proxy for development activity, are on pace to reach 14 billion in 2026, a sharp jump from last year’s total
"To handle this surge in activity, Microsoft is adding extra computing capacity via Amazon Web Services," Business Insider indicated, citing two people familiar with the plans.
Speaking to the outlet, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that GitHub is seeking additional compute capacity from third-party cloud providers, but didn't comment about its arrangement with Amazon:
"The incredible spike in agentic development that began late last year has tested our infrastructure's limits. To meet this demand, Microsoft is both accelerating our move to Azure and continuing to explore a multi-cloud strategy to ensure we have the future capacity, compute elasticity, and horizontal scale required to support continued growth."
Amazon declined to comment directly, but noted: "Customers choose AWS for its global infrastructure that delivers reliable, secure, and efficient performance at scale. We remain committed to providing the best results for every workload."
Elsewhere, shareholders have filed a class action lawsuit against Microsoft, alleging the company deliberately overstated Copilot’s success and its partnership with OpenAI. They also contend Microsoft failed to disclose Azure’s revenue slump while pouring billions into expanding AI data center infrastructure.
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