I only posted this because I had some immediate insight into the nature of the issue - i.e. one of Github's two DNS providers seems to be having issues. Someone

I only posted this because I had some immediate insight into the nature of the issue - i.e. one of Github's two DNS providers seems to be having issues. Someone less familiar with DNS could learn a little by running the commands I put in the original post and seeing how the results differ. It might also be interesting to see how the reality of the issue translates into their eventual status page update. In general though, I absolutely agree that generic 'X is down' messages with no further information are pointless.