One thought: GitHub is basically a bunch of very complicated interconnected databases, no? I mean, to some extent all large web companies are, but GitHub much more than most. Any failure is going to be, in some sense, a database failure.

Another thought: this could speak to a critical weakness in GitHub’s database team. Maybe they hired a lot of bad developers to the database team at the same time, maybe a bad culture took root in the database wing’s management team.