I seriously doubt this version of the story. While it's possible for several hardware/firmware to fail in all your datacenters, for them to fail at the same time is highly unlikely. This may just be a PR spin to think they're not vulnerable to security attacks.
While this was happening at Github, I noticed several other companies facing that same issue at the same time. Atlassian was down for the most part. It could have been an issue with the service github uses, but they won't admit that. Notice they never said what the firmware issue was instead blaming it on 'hardware'.
I think they should be transparent with people about such vulnerability, but I suspect they would never say so because then they would lose revenue.
They're not hosted in multiple datacenters; there was a power interruption in their single datacenter that exposed this firmware bug. The point of this postmortem isn't the initial power interruption but rather its repercussions, why it took so long to recover from and how they can improve their response and communications in the future.
Ok...so this is another PR...without admitting the issue. I don't know github's infrastructure, but they have a single point of failure? Last I know, every place these days have backup power especially a datacenter...so those were not working either? My point is that it's much better to be upfront sometimes. In fact github didn't have to say anything about the whole thing since everyone forgot already...
While this was happening at Github, I noticed several other companies facing that same issue at the same time. Atlassian was down for the most part. It could have been an issue with the service github uses, but they won't admit that. Notice they never said what the firmware issue was instead blaming it on 'hardware'.
I think they should be transparent with people about such vulnerability, but I suspect they would never say so because then they would lose revenue.
Here on my blog I talked about this issue: http://julesjaypaulynice.com/simple-server-malicious-attacks...
I think it was some ddos campaign going on over the web.