Description

GitHub was degraded for seven hours and forty-seven minutes on August 17. Most of the site came back in about three hours. Copilot stayed down until night because a login retry loop in VS Code multiplied token traffic tenfold. Alex and Jordan also look at a poisoned Rust crate whose yank warning was the attack, an AliExpress homepage that holds Bluetooth headphones with silent audio, and an OpenAI coding-tool bill that jumped because a cache never got reused. The side of tech news nobody talks about.

Hosts: Alex & Jordan

Show: Chief Skeptic Officer — The side of tech news nobody talks about.

Drop: Daily at 7:00 A.M. America/New_York

Episode date: 2026-08-21

In this episode

• GitHub August 17 outage — Capacity on the blog. A sidecar limit and a Copilot retry storm on the status page.
• arrayref crate — Clean library, fake extra package, compile-time payload. Yanking the good versions was the delivery.
• AliExpress WebAudio — Mute does nothing. Zero-gain tones still hold the headphones. The fingerprint barely works.
• Quick hit — Codex on Bedrock — Cache writes, almost no cache reads. The workaround is turning web search off.

Links

• GitHub Blog — the August 17 outage
• GitHub Status — incident RCA
• HN — The August 17 outage
• Rust Blog — supply chain attack on arrayref
• SafeDep — arrayref build-time payload
• HN — malicious Rust crate arrayref
• laserphile — AliExpress WebAudio fingerprinting
• Tom Ritter — WebAudio fingerprinting is nearly useless
• HN — AliExpress silent WebAudio
• openai/codex#37674 — Bedrock cache-write spend
• HN — Codex on AWS Bedrock 10x charges

AI disclosure

This episode was created with artificial intelligence. Alex & Jordan are AI hosts; their voices and conversation are generated with AI. Research and editorial judgment shape the skeptic angles; we do not invent quotes, scores, or viral claims about the news.