GitHub rebuilds its storage as traffic surges

GitHub, which many developers use to store and share code, has seen significantly more traffic in a year. GitHub says so itself in a technical post dated October 6, 2026, which was updated October 26.

The numbers behind the growth

The number of pushes, meaning when developers send changes up to GitHub, rose 4.9 times from September 2025 to August 2026. That corresponds to growth from 0.69 billion to 3.35 billion per month.

The number of commits, which are saved changes to the code, reached 7.38 billion in September 2026. That is more than five times as many as a year earlier. Runs of GitHub Actions, which are automated tasks on the platform, totaled 3.26 billion in September 2026, roughly four times as many as the year before.

Git events grew from 218.2 billion to 473.3 billion per month. That is more than a doubling. The most heavily loaded repository received about 1 billion requests in August 2026.

From Spokes to Azure

GitHub's current system is called Spokes. By default, it stores five copies of each repository on local file servers, and storage and compute are tightly coupled.

In the new architecture, the authoritative repository data lives in Azure Blob Storage. Storage and compute are separated, so they can be scaled independently. The system uses lightweight read cache workers, and maintenance such as compaction and garbage collection runs on separate background workers. GitHub cites two design principles: minimizing coordination and separating storage from compute.

According to GitHub, 99.99999% of repositories have been moved to Azure. GitHub reports up to 35 times higher write capacity in internal benchmarks. These are GitHub's own figures, and they have not been independently verified.

What does Computerworld say?

According to Computerworld, GitHub is also expanding capacity with 4 million additional CPU cores and 160 petabytes of storage. These figures appear only at Computerworld.

Computerworld also writes that the amount of AI-generated code being uploaded has increased fivefold in a year, and that September 2026 saw 7.6 billion contributions. That differs from GitHub's 7.38 billion commits, which may be due to different counting methods. How much of the growth is due to AI agents is not specified in GitHub's figures. The link to AI is an interpretation.

Computerworld also mentions Microsoft's new Copilot Fusion, which, according to the article, routes requests on to the AI model that fits best.