I'm going to trust the constant stream of updates from the company itself which shows exactly what went down and came back up rather than a random anecdote.

I only found this post because I decided to check HN after getting HTTP 500 errors pulling some repos.

If you look at the incident details it also claims most services were impacted.

> Git Operations is experiencing degraded availability. We are continuing to investigate.

https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/n07yy1bk6kc4

Recent years have shown this to be the wrong prediction strategy. The reason seems to be an incentive imbalance where there are quite a few reasons for companies to lie (including their own CLAs) and not a lot of repercussions for doing so (everybody competes on lock-in, not on product). Of course, the word-of-mouth approach is also exploitable by dishonest actors, but thus far there doesn’t look to be a lot of exploitation going on, likely because there’s little reason to bother (once again, lock-in is king).

This seems intelligent, after all companies are incapable of making errors in reporting and also have absolutely no incentive to lie about stuff like that. Those 500 errors others have reported as experiencing must have just been the wind.