GitHub is a major code repository used by developers across the world. It hosts a mixture of public and private projects split across open and closed source.

The outage was first reported on the GitHub Status Messages page at 15:47 UTC (8:47am Pacific Time).

Over the past few years, the site has become one of the main places that people push their repositories to, and for that reason an outage has a major effect on the developer community.

DDoS attacks are frequently used by hackers as a way of probing vulnerabilities in a site, so there is a chance these outages come from probing attempts by hackers keen to get at code stored on the service.

"The site continues to be operational, however we are going to keep the status at yellow while we continue to monitor closely and work with our upstream providers," the site's Status Messages reported at 9:56 Pacific time.