GitHub down again? no PR access

186 points by yodon ↗ HN
Githubstatus.com currently says everything is working, but it isn't

78 comments

[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 5.3 ms ] thread
I'm seeing "Merge status cannot be loaded" when attempting to merge a PR.

It's a shame I had to go to HN to check if I was the only one instead of relying on their status page that they link.

Yep, started with PR changes not being visible, but now can't load entire repos. I see the pink unicorn.
Which AI model is it this time?
(comment deleted)
It is not working at all, I can not load any repo pages.

Github.com's promise is that it can be the central broker of open source code because it is reliable.

That promise hasn't been kept recently.

That said, Github is hard to displace and it is similar to the era of the Twitter Fail Whales. It was a sign of growth that couldn't be properly managed but there was not viable alternative.

I'll keep my open source stuff there forever, because I like the eyeballs. But this has got to be making corporate customers flee in droves. Of course, that's exactly what GitHub _doesn't_ want.
githubstatus.com has been updated with an incident now:

> Update - We are seeing an approximate 20% error rate across numerous experiences including Pull Requests, Issues, and others. Investigations are currently under way and we will be posting updates as they become available Aug 17, 2026 - 13:45 UTC

It's been a downward spiral since covid.

Enterprise works ok-ish, but the standard version has daily issue ever since.

Enterprise here and it's down all the time. Right now and it was down 4 days ago as well.
why isnt nyone using the alternatives like gitlawb?
Did they switch to Azure?
yes as they say they do it in order to power resource-heavy, next-generation AI workflows like GitHub Copilot and autonomous agentic developer tools
tenth per day, I almost think my network is noet working.
Anyone else getting "Cannot retrieve latest commit at this time?"
Whatever it is, it seems to be getting worse: started with pull requests and Actions being down, now I can't even list my repos. Might be the worst one yet.
Alright! Let's go make some coffee and get fresh air
Help encourage alternatives by trying Gitlab.com and Codeberg.org and others, and please star some projects there to help motivate more options.

Self-promo links below if you would like to star a few of mine good for developers.

https://gitlab.com/architecture-decision-record

https://gitlab.com/ways-of-working

https://gitlab.com/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure

GitHub being ruined after the AI hype is a shallow take imo. The root problem isn't AI, Microsoft, or Azure; It's why people keep _trusting_ centralized infra.

GitLab and Codeberg can absolutely become trash, each in their own way.

The solution isn't just "migrating off of GitHub"; it's "migrating to a platform that is unownable by design, not only hope".

And there are no good enough decentralized alternatives to GitHub yet.

Tangled.org's decentralization has serious holes. Radicle made an alien universe; a niche within a niche. Also, it's already having problems with ISPs: https://radicle.dev/2026/04/23/domain-move

Azure was arguably as garbage four years ago as it is today, the only thing that's changed in the past few years is MS mandated vibe coding, and suddenly Github has an outage every week? A ridiculous coincidence if it's not causal.
What are the serious holes?
The main hole is that ATProto's data model is a bit awkward for a code forge.

Issues/PRs/comments are records owned by their authors, not by the repo. So an issue can span N users' PDSes. That's a neat model for social media, but a forge wants the repo to be the durable owner/context of its issues and history because that's where the comment/issue/etc. logically belongs.

The solution? tangled.org acts as a super advanced cache/aggregator for that. What can possibly go wrong?

There's a good chance this will change in the future and the repo on the knot will also contain the social aspects of repos (issues, PRs, etc.)

> As time goes on we are re-assessing the idea of users owning what is "collaborative data" (issues, PRs, etc.) on their PDSes - soon may come the day that an issue also lives on the knot as a source of truth, with an accompanying pointer record on user PDS to attest that it's theirs.

from https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core/tree/master/knot2

Rather use BitBucket or GitLab really, both GitLab and BitBucket have been around nearly as long as GitHub? Apparently BitBucket and GitHub are both 2008, and GitLab is 2011. The others you mentioned could go on a whim.
I don't know BitBucket, but GitLab is felt extremely bloated and slow - Codeberg is much leaner and faster
I started my career in programming with Subversion was the most popular tool. I also had to work a little with VSS, Perforce, Mercurial and, obviously, Git. I was one of the first users of Google Code...

So, relatively, not so long ago it was pretty common to host all this stuff yourself. I don't think (or maybe don't remember) Subversion having any Web interface of its own, but, since forever Git came with GitWeb. I remember configuring it for the first time: any extra bit of configuration, especially those that resulted in some added interactive functionality seemed exciting. For a week, I'd push something to my branch and immediately refresh the browser page to see my changes reflected in the remote repository :D

The infatuation wore off very quickly: after a month I have almost forgotten the Web interface even existed.

The cycle repeated with hosted services, the addition of PR interface, the addition of "pages", the bug reports, the built-in Wiki. After discovering the new gadget and associated hype, invariably, came the realization that the predating existing functionality was... better. The PR discussion in the Web page detached from the code is a lot worse than the PR discussion in the PR itself. The built-in issue tracker doesn't come close to the stand-alone product functionality. The built-in Wiki is ridiculously underwhelming when compared to an actual Wiki.

And so was the CI. For me, it started with Gitlab. There are oh so many reasons to hate Jenkins, so, whenever anyone announced an alternative platform, I'd absolutely check it out, and so did a lot of others, I presume. I was super hyped up about the possibility of running CI from the command line, completely locally on my laptop. And then it turned out to be a bait-and-switch kind of thing. I've created monumental dozen-steps and branching pipelines connecting multiple projects only to realize that the best CI is the one that uses as little as possible of the platform tools.

In the end of the day, I came to realization, that beside the social aspect of the platform like GitHub, everything that it offers on top of the essential Git repository storage is too low quality. And so do competitors. If I was ever again tasked with setting up a company code repository storage, I'd go with a physical server attached to the local office network, unless there's no office, in which case, probably, some EC2 VM would do the job...

Places like GitHub or Gitlab lure you in with their free tier offering, where you get the storage space and some other goodies for free, but once you need to upgrade to the paid tier, you inevitably realize that it's not worth the money they charge for it.

Cannot even merge code, this is the limit for me. We are prioritising migration to a different platform and this time going to decouple CI - right now we have too many points of failure on one vendor.
Apologies if you already tried this, but I have been able to merge and get some things done via command line.

e.g.: gh pr merge 5062 -R <org/repo> --squash --delete-branch

I was also able to merge a pr and do a release using cli.

I'm going to leave them alone for the rest of the day.

Same, not be be obtuse; but I am just going to take this as a sign to go read a book in the park and be genuinely grateful that I have that option.
merges work fine, the git experience as well, this is a web infra issue
Well, seems that AI vibecoding is working it's magic!
GitHub is too important to fail, and they obviously can't fix their up-time problem. Shouldn't they open-source core and/or problematic components and ask for public to fix it? this is not sustainable. It's literally blocking development/productivity worldwide.