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GitHub is a widely used online platform where software developers store, share and collaborate on computer code. It is owned by Microsoft and is relied upon by millions of individual programmers as well as large companies, open-source projects and organisations to keep track of changes to their software and work together on it.

Because so many people and businesses depend on GitHub for their day-to-day work, any disruption to the service can have knock-on effects well beyond the site itself. Software teams may be unable to save or share changes to their code, and other tools and services that connect to GitHub in the background can also be affected.

Large technology companies typically publish a public "status page" where they report ongoing problems with their services, describing the type and scale of the issue while engineers investigate. These reports are usually updated as more is known and until the problem is resolved.