Enhancing our COVID-19 response to care for our community and team

Since our initial statement on March 3, the global COVID-19 outbreak has evolved rapidly. Our top priority is to support our employees and community through these unprecedented circumstances. GitHub’s mission is to be the home for all developers—a platform they can depend on to securely collaborate in building the world’s software. So we’ve taken further steps to ensure that our people can be safe and productive wherever they are, and that our community’s home on GitHub remains reliable and resilient.

Our employees

We’re dedicated to protecting the health of our team so that we can continue to do our best work for the GitHub community.

• Remote work: While we’ve always had a largely remote workforce, over the past two weeks we’ve asked all employees who are normally in a GitHub office or coworking space to begin working from home, unless it’s essential that they’re in an office to do their jobs. We’re ensuring that all employees have the tools and equipment they need to be productive from home.
• Family leave: Our family leave policy will provide pay continuity for any employee who needs to take time off to care for children or other family members during school or dependent care closures.
• Travel: We’ve restricted all domestic and international business travel except trips that are critical to business continuity.
• Support for hourly workers: We’ll continue to pay hourly workers, such as the vendors who provide services in our offices, to support them during this period of reduced service.

Our community

We take our responsibility to our community seriously and have plans in place to ensure we can maintain essential staffing and business functions to be a source of stability to those who depend on us.

• Security and backups: Every line of code you entrust us with is stored on a minimum of six different servers, and additional off-site backups. Our data center infrastructure stores customer data in Tier 3+ sites and maintains hot-spare (at least N+1) redundancy for all storage and compute systems and full (2N or higher) redundancy for critical components. We maintain offsite operational run-books and an on-call rotation for all mission-critical services.
• Support: We’ll continue to provide support for all of our customers. Our Support Team is highly distributed around the world—more than 80 percent of the team works from home. This means we have the staff and flexibility to ensure continued 24×5 support for Enterprise Cloud, Server, and Dotcom customers, and 24×7 support for Premium customers.

We’re honored that some of the important work being done to help contain and mitigate COVID-19 is happening on GitHub, and we know that GitHub is essential to the business continuity plans of many of our global customers. We’re committed to prioritizing stability, health, and safety for our team and our community around the world.

We’re also committed to being a positive force for progress, and several teams are working to support key efforts around COVID-19. In the coming weeks, stay tuned for updates from our Social Impact Team’s Open Source for Good program and potential ways to get involved in their work with OSS projects and organizations in public health.

Written by

Erica Brescia

@ebrescia