Credit: GitHub status page Yes, it's extenuating times and circumstances due to more people working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On April 22, two back-to-back outages affected numerous developers over at least a two-hour period. And today, April 23, several GitHub services are being impacted by various problems, starting around 13:20 UTC (9:20 a.m. ET) and it's still ongoing as of an hour later. Update: Today's outage was designated by Microsoft officials as over at 16:01 UTC, nearly three hours after its officially marked start time. Like the other recent outages, no cause was provided and no information about the recovery procedure was made publicly available.
Today's outage is affecting Git Operations; API Requests; Webhooks; Issues, pull requests and projects; GitHub Actions; GitHub Packages; GitHub Pages and more. On the GitHub status site, only Git Operations is listed as having an incident; other services are labeled as "degraded."
While the GitHub status site does provide periodic updates on where Microsoft is at in attempting to remedy various outages, it doesn't provide any details about what's going wrong. On Twitter, several developers have been asking for Microsoft to provide more detailed post-mortems on GitHub issues. I've asked Microsoft why there have been so many GitHub outages this week. No word back so far.