When a sealed court order can halt your IT operation — and what that teaches about resilience
InfrastructureRisk
On June 10 and 11, 2026, technology teams in Brazil faced an unusual problem: the GitHub API (api.github.com) stopped responding in the country, while the website stayed up as normal. The practical result was stuck continuous integration pipelines, stalled automations and engineering teams losing hours until they worked out that the problem was not in the code, nor in the cloud, nor in the local internet provider, but in a network block ordered by a court, apparently aimed at another target, which hit, as a side effect, critical infrastructure used by millions of companies.
Why this matters for those outside the technical field
Brazil has a recurring mechanism for blocking content on the internet, normally to fight piracy and illegal gambling and, in this specific case, the opening of the 2026 World Cup. These blocks are carried out by telecom operators on Anatel's order, often based on court decisions under seal, with no prior notice, no public list and, in many cases, no possibility of a quick challenge. There have been similar cases affecting GitHub Pages and other legitimate services.
For a company, this means a real operational risk: essential infrastructure can become unavailable by a third party's decision, without any technical failure of its own and without a window for communication.
What this teaches about IT maturity
Companies with resilient operations do not treat this type of event as a surprise but as a foreseeable scenario within the business continuity plan. Some practices that set mature organizations apart:
- Redundancy of critical infrastructure: not depending on a single provider, region or network route for essential processes (CI/CD, deploys, integrations).
- Internal caches and mirrors for software dependencies, reducing exposure to real-time external outages.
- Documented contingency plans for regulatory block or regional unavailability scenarios, treated with the same seriousness as a disaster recovery plan.
- Proactive monitoring that tells "our system went down" apart from "the external network is blocked", speeding up diagnosis and response.
- Geographic diversification of critical components, where feasible, as a way to mitigate jurisdictional risks.
A reflection for leadership
Resilience is not only about hardware failures or cyberattacks. Increasingly, it also involves regulatory and legal risks that can affect the availability of essential services without any warning. Including this kind of scenario in continuity planning, and investing in architectures less dependent on single points of failure, has stopped being a luxury and become part of the risk management of any digital operation.