At this point, "GH is down" posts are competing with "Newest LLM Hype" for the HN front-page week over week.
For my personal project, I've been considering moving everything over to Codeberg. Stability of GH being one reason, but I also like the idea of an alternative that is not strictly tied to a big tech company.
And yet, you haven’t. That’s the problem with dominant platforms: Slight inconveniences + inertia are enough to ensure no-one moves (even without monopolistic abuse – and I’m talking about Microsoft here).
Keep in mind that it's easy to call someone else incompetent whenever their thing doesn't work, but we have no full idea what's going on behind the scenes. They could be very competent people in an unwinnable situation (like being forced to use Azure).
Things are a lot better in Europe. I stopped working hours before this incident started, and I can't really remember any major work-stopping indicents in the past months. I only remember once trying to do hobby stuff in the evening that was impacted recently.
Copilot is fully independent of the code forge parts of GitHub, so I would imagine it’s running on completely different infrastructure, without any hard dependencies on the Rails monolith.
I keep wondering what causing such a bad service from GH lately, is it the overuse of AI generated code? Are they trying to cut costs with the infrastructure?
Part of it is additional load. Part of it is their move of more and more of Github infrastructure to Azure.
I've done a lot of "plain compute" work [0] with the Big Three Cloud Compute vendors. Azure is by far the worst. Mysterious resource creation failures, mysterious resource deletion failures, mysterious "incompatible schema" failures when talking to Azure provisioning and status infrastructure, mysterious and inexplicable performance problems, etc, etc, etc. Unless I was being paid a lot of money to use Azure, I'd take Google's legendarily nonexistent support over Azure's unreliability any day.
[0] That is, "create a VM with persistent disks, Internet access, and maybe a load balancer in front and ignore all of the other features provided by the vendor"
Github has published some incredible usage rate increase numbers, which they ascribe to the rise of agentic coding. At some point, they are going to have to change rate limits, cut free-tier usage, or find some other path to reducing load. It's clear that their infrastructure can't keep up with this significant increase, and it's unlikely that they're going to just absorb the increased costs themselves.
Very curious to see what the future holds for Github.
For literally decades, I’ve observed that there are systems that make each operation cheap and systems that work hard to scale out. The former frequently seems to wildly outperform the latter.
GitHub, for example, seems to implement the main repository /pulls page as a search query, which is hinted at by the prefilled search bar and was mostly confirmed last week when the search backend failed and pull requests didn’t load. But it could have been implemented as a plain API call that just loads open pull requests, and that API exists and did not go down.
If GitHub focused a bit on identifying their top 95% of high level operations (page loads including resulting API calls, for example) and making them efficient, I bet they could get a 5x or better reduction in backend load by simplifying them.
(Don’t even get me started on the diff viewer. I realize that much of its awfulness is the horribly inefficient front end, which does not directly load the back end, but I expect there is plenty of room for improvement. The plain git command line features are very fast.)
Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025.
Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if
growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week
in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.
So we're pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and
strengthening GitHub’s core features.
It's a bit hard to blindly trust their numbers when they are trying very hard to sell Copilot to everyone.
Sure, AI will undoubtedly have increased their workload, but how much of the shown figures is real, and how much is the PR department trying to make it look like Copilot & friends is a massive success?
Have they published incredible usage rate numbers somewhere? I saw their recent blog post about the outages[1] and it has a graph without axis labels and without any context around usage before 2019 to indicate just how much this agentic acceleration has actually increased usage growth.
A week ago GitHub published a blog post saying this, a day later GitHub execs were in HN comments repeating it, and just like that it’s common knowledge that GitHub’s steady reliability decline from the 2019 onward was actually caused not by the 2019 Microsoft integration, but by something that did not exist until 2023. PR works, y’all. Turns out the reason GitHub doesn’t work is because it’s just so good!
What you described above will piss off and alienate even more people. Eventually there will be a critical threshold crossed. Microslop will be the first victim of Skynet 11.0 (I lost track of its current version but you can see how much damage is caused by AI in general now - this was the beginning of skynet. Except that it sucks).
The disappointing thing is that if you do some digging, you'll find the majority of that it's slop and just outright spam. There's a page on GitHub where you can see recently updated repositories and it's very rare I see anything of quality on there.
GitHub has become a dumping ground for broken code and it has more bots than ever. As much as I hate ID verification it might be a necessarily evil at this point because clearly their anti-bot measures aren't working.
IMO that site overcounts downtime. If you filter for major and critical outages (the kind that make the front page of HN), the story is still bad but it’s not 84.92% bad.
I do not like why git doesn't have a built in bug or issue tracker and a kanban board or something.
I wished Git and Fossil hybrid should have won.
I thought about using fossil many times but it seems codex and claude have deeper integration with git.
I don't like installing software which keeps growing into infinite feature Monster. Maybe I'll install gitea or forgjo idk.
That's the last piece of puzzle remaining for me I've already mastered deployment and HA on bare metal from OVH and Hertzner, already have scaled to tons of users
GitHub is actively used to do code review and bug tracking. There is a number of tools that offer it on top of git, in a distributed way, but it means that yo need to install them locally on every machine involved.
What's worse, GitHub is widely used as a CI/CD solution, it runs massive amount of build pipelines and test suites. There is a ton of players in this space, too.
GitHub's main value proposition was having all these things in one place, as a convenient web app, for free or for moderate money. So they're crushed by the success of their model.
"I thought about using fossil many times but it seems codex and claude have deeper integration with git."
Don't let "agentic" "coding" be the reason to avoid fossil.
Fossil and other VCS are much easier for humans to use than Git is; there's no reason to have an LLM burning up tokens and the environment to do tasks you'd do yourself quickly and correctly.
The amount of damage Github has done to its brand is something so phenomenal that I think it might be studied in future case studies. Skype and Github were two microsoft products which everyone used until they degraded it. Windows itself can be included in it too now.
It feels weird (sad?) that I'm starting to get a sixth sense for when Github is going to a service disruption.
About an hour ago, clicking "Resolve Conversation" in a Pull Request failed a few times with an error message that appeared lower on the page (outside the viewport), and which I did not see the first few times. I had to reload the page after every few actions to get the server to register new ones.
I told a colleague, and added "Github might be having an issue with some other service, and it's just bleeding over to PR comments? Maybe it will snowball into a larger outage?"
96 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 66.8 ms ] threadFor my personal project, I've been considering moving everything over to Codeberg. Stability of GH being one reason, but I also like the idea of an alternative that is not strictly tied to a big tech company.
I lost track which Monday morning PST in a row this is.
I've done a lot of "plain compute" work [0] with the Big Three Cloud Compute vendors. Azure is by far the worst. Mysterious resource creation failures, mysterious resource deletion failures, mysterious "incompatible schema" failures when talking to Azure provisioning and status infrastructure, mysterious and inexplicable performance problems, etc, etc, etc. Unless I was being paid a lot of money to use Azure, I'd take Google's legendarily nonexistent support over Azure's unreliability any day.
[0] That is, "create a VM with persistent disks, Internet access, and maybe a load balancer in front and ignore all of the other features provided by the vendor"
Very curious to see what the future holds for Github.
Usage numbers is the PR reason. Vibecoding insanity in Microsoft is the more plausible actual culprit.
GitHub, for example, seems to implement the main repository /pulls page as a search query, which is hinted at by the prefilled search bar and was mostly confirmed last week when the search backend failed and pull requests didn’t load. But it could have been implemented as a plain API call that just loads open pull requests, and that API exists and did not go down.
If GitHub focused a bit on identifying their top 95% of high level operations (page loads including resulting API calls, for example) and making them efficient, I bet they could get a 5x or better reduction in backend load by simplifying them.
(Don’t even get me started on the diff viewer. I realize that much of its awfulness is the horribly inefficient front end, which does not directly load the back end, but I expect there is plenty of room for improvement. The plain git command line features are very fast.)
They also had a recent blog post about availability: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
I don't envy the scaling issues the GitHub engineers are facing! #HugOps
Sure, AI will undoubtedly have increased their workload, but how much of the shown figures is real, and how much is the PR department trying to make it look like Copilot & friends is a massive success?
1. https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
What you described above will piss off and alienate even more people. Eventually there will be a critical threshold crossed. Microslop will be the first victim of Skynet 11.0 (I lost track of its current version but you can see how much damage is caused by AI in general now - this was the beginning of skynet. Except that it sucks).
GitHub has become a dumping ground for broken code and it has more bots than ever. As much as I hate ID verification it might be a necessarily evil at this point because clearly their anti-bot measures aren't working.
I don't know how this is even remotely close to acceptable.
https://isgithubcooked.com/?severities=major.critical
It treats any service being down as the entire platform being down which is nonsense.
It's just lying with statistics.
Although I think I still ironically end up finding out about the outages on HN first.
And I still only have local git repository.
I do not like why git doesn't have a built in bug or issue tracker and a kanban board or something.
I wished Git and Fossil hybrid should have won.
I thought about using fossil many times but it seems codex and claude have deeper integration with git.
I don't like installing software which keeps growing into infinite feature Monster. Maybe I'll install gitea or forgjo idk.
That's the last piece of puzzle remaining for me I've already mastered deployment and HA on bare metal from OVH and Hertzner, already have scaled to tons of users
Radicle supports issues directly as part of the git object database.
What's worse, GitHub is widely used as a CI/CD solution, it runs massive amount of build pipelines and test suites. There is a ton of players in this space, too.
GitHub's main value proposition was having all these things in one place, as a convenient web app, for free or for moderate money. So they're crushed by the success of their model.
Don't let "agentic" "coding" be the reason to avoid fossil.
Fossil and other VCS are much easier for humans to use than Git is; there's no reason to have an LLM burning up tokens and the environment to do tasks you'd do yourself quickly and correctly.
About an hour ago, clicking "Resolve Conversation" in a Pull Request failed a few times with an error message that appeared lower on the page (outside the viewport), and which I did not see the first few times. I had to reload the page after every few actions to get the server to register new ones.
I told a colleague, and added "Github might be having an issue with some other service, and it's just bleeding over to PR comments? Maybe it will snowball into a larger outage?"