Five-nines Memes

GitHub promises 99.999% uptime (the legendary "5 nines" that SREs sell their souls for), which translates to about 5 minutes of downtime per year. So naturally, when they got breached, the attackers had to work with roughly a 300-second window to pull off their heist. The joke here is that GitHub's uptime is SO good that even the hackers are impressed they managed to find a gap in the schedule to break in. It's like robbing a bank that's only closed for 5 minutes annually—you better have your timing down to the millisecond. The irony cuts deep because while GitHub's infrastructure team is out here flexing their reliability metrics, the security team apparently left a window open. Different kind of uptime problem, folks.