The ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for developers. When GitHub goes down, it's not just an outage—it's a company-wide productivity apocalypse wrapped in a legitimate excuse. Your manager walks by demanding results? "GitHub is down." Suddenly you're not slacking, you're a victim of circumstances. Can't push code, can't pull updates, can't even pretend to look at pull requests. It's like a snow day for programmers, except instead of building snowmen, you're browsing Reddit and calling it "waiting for critical infrastructure to recover." The beauty is in the legitimacy. You're not lying—you genuinely can't work. Well, you could work locally, but let's not get crazy here. The entire modern development workflow revolves around GitHub like planets around the sun. No version control? That's basically coding in the dark ages. Manager's instant "oh, carry on" is chef's kiss. Even they know the drill. When GitHub's down, the whole dev team enters a state of sanctioned limbo.