Update: After 23 minutes of outage, GitHub is back up...

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Less than 24 hours after CES was plunged into darkness by a power outage, GitHub - arguably the world's largest software development platform - is down, sparking turmoil among developers worldwide.

As one knowledgable tech expert warned "ever wonder what the end of the world looks like? It's this..."

Why is it such a big deal? Simple...

Every major website and software project in the world relies on the availability of the repositories of code stored and git hub.

As part of continuous integration and continuous development workflows those repositories are queried for their contents every time a new build or release of a website or project is made.

If they are unavailable those builds will fail. Good developers plan for that contingency but error handling is difficult and error-prone.

And GitHub should be in GitHub.

An outage like this basically means that any sites that need to update as a result of some weird bug they found or any software that needs to be patched can't happen.

Open source software is built on a web of interconnected and distributed components. When it works it's tremendously efficient but if it fails things go south quickly.