GitHub was down first working day of 2019, hacker claims DDoS

This Wednesday, GitHub pages were non-functional as there was some instability in their servers. A hacker claimed that he performed a DDoS attack on the website. Github was down for roughly about an hour before normal functionality was restored.

A hacker that goes by the name of Hax Stroke, a part of Ghost Squad Hackers Tweeted:

https://twitter.com/HaxStroke/status/1080517770222231553

Hax Stroke claims to have performed the attack using RPCBIND service DDoS amp and that it was ‘just a demo’.

The Issues, PRs, Dashboard, Projects seemed to be down, enough for the website to not load at all.

https://twitter.com/odraudek99/status/1080517844763377665

The outage was observed in many parts of the globe.

https://twitter.com/ReportOutage/status/1080517092569423878

The same person also claims to be responsible for the YouTube outage end of last year.

https://twitter.com/HaxStroke/status/1052743020435640325

The new year has just started and users observed issues in using GitHub:

https://twitter.com/arungupta/status/1080518646152089601

On their status website, their official comment as of January 2, 16:32 UTC is: “Resolved - We observed elevated error rates and discovered a capacity issue in one of our databases which impacted Web, API, and Gists. A backlog was cleared and systems returned to normal.”

This isn’t the first time when the crowd favorite open-source repository was malfunctional. In October last year, GitHub was down for one whole day due to a failure in its data storage system.