VS Code Retry Bug Amplifies GitHub Outage

This is a textbook retry storm: a client-side resilience feature turned a regional failure into a broader authentication crisis.

• –GitHub says delayed responses from one internal endpoint triggered the VS Code retry bug.
• –Traffic was amplified approximately 10x, overwhelming load balancers and exhausting HAProxy flow limits.
• –Copilot Token Service failures persisted after core GitHub services recovered.
• –The incident highlights why retries need exponential backoff, strict caps, jitter, and circuit breakers.
• –AI coding tools increasingly depend on centralized authentication and cloud control planes, making outages highly contagious.