The Cloud Middleware Dataset is an open-source project hosted on GitHub. It aims to provide visibility into the middleware installed by major cloud service providers like Azure, AWS, and GCP. The project highlights the potential security risks of these middleware installations, often done without the customer's explicit consent.
On October 21st, 2018, GitHub, the world's leading software development platform, experienced a significant operational mishap. During routine maintenance work on their East Coast network, connectivity to a hub was severed, creating a network partition between the East Coast data center and everything else. This incident led to GitHub losing half of its servers. Although the maintenance crew restored the connection in 43 seconds, GitHub experienced an additional 24 hours of service degradation. Users couldn't log in, stale data was served, and the website was read-only.