Taking down GitHub would instantly make millions of developers at thousands of companies unable to do their work.

Interestingly, my country (Turkey) did ban github (along with google drive, microsoft onedrive etc.) back in 2016. However they reopened it within hours (18 hours to be exact), because systems all over the country were failing. One of the driving reasons was that ATMs stopped working. Appearently they were downloading some updates from github to function.

Stupidity has no limits.

For more info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub

And GitLab has now banned Iranians:

https://ahmadhaghighi.com/blog/2020/gitlab/

I am well aware of that. But RIAA likely doesn't care one iota about that damage. The injunction they'd write would be along the lines of:

"It's necessary that the entirety of GitHub be shut down until this case is decided. As noted here, they have persistently failed to adhere to our DMCA take-down notices, and continue to knowingly host content that circumvents our copyright protection schemes. Furthermore, it is not sufficient to just remove this content, because it has been and will be repeatedly readded, and GitHub has taken no action to remove these extra copies. We are likely to succeed on our merits because <blah>. We are irreparably harmed because <blah>."

That doesn't mean they'd necessarily win on a broad injunction, but they can still push for one (see Apple v Epic for a recent example). And stunts like this one make it more likely that a judge might agree that a broad injunction is necessary instead of a narrow one.

If we cannot shut down criminal banks because they are too big to fail. Then we certainly cannot shut down Github.

Only for a few days, critically.

GitHub may be the single source of truth, but it’s not the only copy of the data.

It will take far more than "a few days" to change GitHub-based workflows. Data loss is not the only way to lose productivity.

Any diligent company that relies on GitHub so heavily will have a service-level agreement in their contract, which will include compensation for a major outage.

Otherwise they're getting GitHub's best effort, which is exactly what they've paid for.